


Crushing Butterflies

by strange_glow



Series: Virus [9]
Category: Weiß Kreuz, 魔界医師メフィスト | Makai Ishi Mephisto (Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-04-04 09:17:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14017098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_glow/pseuds/strange_glow
Summary: Part 9 of VirusSchwarz is stuck with going back to Shinjuku to try and catch an American/Israeli black ops team out to use the time anomely to change history.Once again, political incorrectness, inappropriate touching, shooting things and people up, and this being Demon City Shinjuku, tentacles.





	1. Chapter 1

Crushing Butterflies  
Chapter One

  
“Ambitious of them,” Griefeldt said grimly, Crawford’s verbal report having sunk in. The older man was well aware of the complications in store for them if the Americans succeeded. His hands had rested on the edge of his desk as he listened, and now he used them to push his chair back and himself to his feet. He went to look out the window, over the view of one of the school’s open park-like spaces. At all the improvements the restoration to the original plan had made. Rather than just surviving under the auspices of those senile old monsters, they had a future now. And once again, the Amis and their Jewish masters threatened that future. “And that was all you got?” he finally asked.  
“I had no time,” Schuldig answered. “But there was not much more than that. It was like a side note in his mind, regarding the issues they are having with China and Japan. If I had been able to hold him for a while, interrogated him more thoroughly…”  
Brad shot him a scathing look. He shut up.  
“Circumstances,” Brad interjected. “I wanted to get Doctor Sarazawa and get out, not leave a huge mess to interest the Czechs.”  
“I did wipe their memories for their entire time in Prague,” Schuldig said. “Just for the hell of it,” he added.  
Brad rolled his eyes.  
Griefeldt half turned. “One of our colleagues is abducted by the CIA purely out of random bad luck, and we just happen to get news of a planned black ops attack on Shinjuku? I think you’re misinterpreting the facts. Are you certain?”  
Brad and Schuldig looked at each other suddenly. “Fujimiya,” they said in unison.  
Griefeldt blinked.  
Brad put a hand to his forehead, a sudden head ache coming on. “Damn it,” he said. “If this is all Fujimiya again, I am going to…”  
“Don’t even try it,” Schuldig warned. “We’ll all end up dead.”  
Griefeldt frowned. He had seen the results of Fujimiya’s tests. He just did not like them. He huffed out an irritated breath. “You’re telling me Doctor Sarazawa went AWOL, to get kidnapped, so that somehow Fujimiya’s ‘future’ endangerment could be avoided? That this is his innate talent acting?”  
Brad looked exasperated. He now wished he had not turned down the offer to sit. “I don’t know, but how ‘lucky’ can we get?” he threw out.  
Schuldig scowled. “Well, we are stuck with it,” he stated. “If we just ignore it, who knows what will go away? Esset does not interfere and the jews and muslims nuke the rest of the planet with their ‘holy war’? I for one do not wish to move to Australia, become an extreme mechanic and subsist on breast milk.” He made a horrid face.  
“And there goes any interest I had in lunch,” Brad muttered.  
Griefeldt stepped back to his desk and leaned to touch a button on the vintage intercom machine. “Frau Traugott, please come in here.”  
Schuldig shuddered.  
Brad narrowed his eyes at the verbose red head. The creature that inhabited the young woman frightened the telepath for no real reason other than that he could not sense her mind. Brad suspected it was just another excuse for drama. Then again, he couldn’t see her future even in the slight amount of time he usually kept his talent leveled at.  
Schuldig side stepped to put Brad between him and the not-so-human chief executive assistant.  
She walked in, standing in an attitude of polite attention, a note pad and pencil in hand. As usual, she wore the grey uniform skirt suit, sensible heels, and her long, wheat blond hair up in a braided crown. A smart pair of oval shaped lenses concealed the silvery sheen over what had been a pair of light blue eyes.  
“You’ve read Schwarz team's report?” Griefeldt asked.  
“Yes, Herr Reichsführer,” she said, relaxing her hands at her sides.  
“Is this possible? Can someone go into the time anomaly containing the city and come out again in the past?” the older man asked very seriously. He still could not quite deal with his empathy talent not picking up any emotion from her. There was a blank where there would normally be a human warmth, and it made her seem even more inhuman. To sense based talents, she was like an animated mannequin, and took some getting used to.  
She looked thoughtful for a long moment. “There are smaller anomalies--temporal whirlpools--that pop up randomly and move across the city, where people have claimed to have been sent to other times in the larger anomaly; hours, days, weeks, years difference. Doctor Mephisto was collecting case records for a while, but the incidents proved too random to actually track. In year seven, the standing procedure became to fence them off with a warning sign until they dissipate.”  
“And most Shinjuku-ites are fully aware of this?” Brad asked, guessing the answer.  
“Naturally,” Traugott replied pleasantly. “Otherwise the population would not have recovered enough to keep the city alive, let alone rebuild.”  
“It would be easy for an assault team to interrogate random people for information on the time gates,” Schuldig looked at Brad.  
“Assuming they would find someone who would not lie, or report them to the authorities,” Traugott said, her tight little smile becoming wicked. “If they weren’t eaten first.”  
“Can we alert the authorities in advance?” Griefeldt asked, not at all sure she was joking.  
Her head tipped back slightly, in thought, or perhaps in contact with her parent-self. “The outside world is currently eighteen years out of synch with Shinjuku. The timing of any message will be considerably delayed.”  
Brad sighed. “We’re going in,” he looked at Reichsführer Griefeldt. “Unless we can beat them to Tokyo, we'll have to hunt them down in there.” He didn’t say that he had already ‘seen’ this. The council was still not aware of how much of his talent had been restored.  
“I’m afraid you will have to assume that at some point concurrent to this side, they are already there,” Traugott informed him.  
“Not from our point of view,” Brad snarled. “We could just as easily assume we have already destroyed them. After all, the world hasn’t gone back to hell yet.”  
She smiled at him indulgently, as a teacher at a prize pupil would.  
Brad realized his chain had been jerked yet again.

  
@ @ @

“Eighteen years!” Nagi exclaimed. “How the hell am I supposed to factor this?” he looked at the laptop. “A week after the quake, we went in twelve years later. Three weeks after, the city was at fifteen post quake. Now it’s at eighteen?”  
“That Det. Kabane,” Brad said. “I’m certain he was from an 19th Century era. Well anti-quake.”  
Nagi scowled. “Weird science, minor gods, mutants, magic, time warps; can I please just have something normal to deal with? I'm getting married in two months, you know.”  
“With any luck, the blushing bride won’t be eighty by then,” Schuldig teased.  
“She’s coming with, or you can all go fuck yourselves,” Nagi snapped.  
“Oh!” Schuldig slapped a hand over his mouth and faked tears. “With that mouth, he talks to his mother!” he said in dismay and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket to fake sobbing into.  
Nagi raised an eyebrow and looked at Brad. “Can I at least shoot him in the leg?” he asked glumly.  
“Not if I shoot him first,” Brad stated.  
Schuldig abruptly folded the handkerchief and put it away, all business again.  
“Just get on with it,” Brad told Nagi.  
Schuldig looked suddenly curious. “What are you up to, Mein Man?”  
“For the moment, it’s just a thought,” Brad replied mildly, still thinking it over.

  
@ @ @

“Martz is doing well,” Sarazawa Ishida informed his son from behind his office desk. “We’ve shipped out Frau Martz and the little monsters to keep him grounded, so Schwarz is off the hook.”  
Unlike Griefeldt’s office, Ishida’s was a welter of papers and over stuffed files, the book cases behind him filled with law books and more files haphazardly shoved into what ever spaces they could fill. A fundamentally suspicious and private man, he refused to have a secretary to keep things tidy.  
Fond of the ‘maker’ ethic of Steam and Deiselpunk, he had recently amused himself by wiring up his father’s vintage G.F. Grosser typewriter to use as a keyboard to an old 50’s Philco oval screened TV set as a CPU box and monitor; the basis being a Raspberry Pi. The odd set up went well with the mess on his desk.  
Yuuji wondered at his father’s random turn of interests. As a kid, he’d seen these fads come and go, and as a teen, realized his father was a polymath. Not a talent per se, but an advantage in a man who could ferret out the truth in any situation brought before him.  
His father looked up from the mess at him. “You’re going to Shinjuku again.”  
“Yes,” Yuuji said.  
“All this—hopping about in time,” his father waved a hand over the piles of paperwork. “Annoying that the Amis think they can pull this shit. I suppose since stealing all of our science they could lay hands on, they think they can whip the world out from under us like an old rug.”  
“We’ll stop them,” Yuuji stated. If there was anything he wanted more than a cigarette, it was revenge. Mother-napping sons of bitches. He knew all about the CIA’s discreet little foreign hell holes and how they tortured people into admitting to things they may not have even considered before the CIA got to them. He took a deep breath to clear his mind. “Naoe is working on the math to get us in and out in time this trip. Literally,” he added with a bit of a shrug.  
His father studied him in silence for a whole minute. Yuuji wondered if he had a hair out of place or something on his nose before his father finally spoke curtly. “The council doesn’t want you playing silly buggers with history, do you understand? If for any reason you get out in the wrong time and get stuck there, you will dispose of the team and kill yourself.”  
Yuuji pulled a face. “Gees, Pop, brutal much,” he found himself reverting back to around age twelve.  
“Naturally, I expect you will all find a way to get back. However, the possibility exists, and you have your orders,” his father stated firmly.  
Yuuji pushed his hair behind his ear and huffed out a sigh. Somewhere along the way, he rather figured his father was reasonably fond of him, but still, the man could be a little more forthcoming with the paternal. “Love you, too, Dad,” he said, just to piss the old man off.

  
@ @ @

Traugott looked up at him archly as Crawford came into the office and set a large covered tray on her desk. He took the high domed lid off and set it on a chair meant for visitors. She surveyed the contents. “What is this?”  
“An offering,” he stated. Then he clapped his hands together twice and bowed respectfully. “August kami-sama, please cast your shadow over me and deal kindly with me.” He looked up at her as he straightened up again, a victorious smirk on his face. Check mate.  
“Damn it,” she said, surprise behind her wry amusement. “That’s cheating.”  
“We had a deal, Nurse, Traugott, or what ever your true name is,” Brad said. “Now accept this act of worship and listen to my petition.”  
“Brute,” she reached over to pick up a piece of smoky, whole grilled red snapper and put it daintily in her mouth, enjoying the flavor of it. “There isn’t a worshipful bone in your body. Speak your petition. Words have power.” She drew the tray closer and picked up the fork from beside the plate.  
He uncapped a flower etched bottle of sake and poured it into a shot glass for her. “The mathematical formula to get us safely in and out of Shinjuku at the right times.”  
She finished chewing a forkful of rice and swallowed, then picked up the sake to wash it down, all the while watching him. “You might as well ask for the specific timing of the wave pattern on a specific beach at a specific hour. Too many factors are involved to predict it to the precise minute.”  
“Hour, then,” he said.  
“Tide,” she said and lifted another piece of snapper to her lips on the tines of the fork.  
“Tide?” he was puzzled.  
She pointed up with a slender index. “You must factor the cycles of the moon, sun and tides.”  
He poured more sake into the glass. “How?” he asked.  
“Something like a Venn diagram should put it within your limited comprehension,” she took up the glass and emptied it again. “Or just re-invent the Antikythera mechanism,” she smiled, teasing.  
Brad weighed this in his mind, trying to decide if she had answered him, or was mocking him, or knowing her kind, both. He went with both. “But we still have to figure it out ourselves,” he said flatly.  
She nodded once. “We cannot live your lives for you, or you would forever remain in the womb.”  
He refilled the shot glass and set the bottle down. “How very uncomfortable.”  
“Well, you tried,” she allowed. “Now run along, your hand has been held and kissed better. There, there, you will do fine and all that,” she put more of the lovely fish in her mouth.  
He scowled at her, then stole one of the flowers from the vase on her desk and put it in the pocket of his jacket like a misplaced boutonniere. He bowed, regarding her like a spoiled child who had not got his way, and turned to leave the office.  
“Herr Crawford,” she said as he reached for the door handle.  
He half turned, still sullen.  
She indicated the tray with her fork, her eyes glowing eerily silver behind her glasses. “We do appreciate the effort. And we do play favorites,” her voice had gone into that creepy multiple mode, but her smile this time was that of the playful German-Swiss girl she inhabited.  
He bowed again slightly, and in the hall way, puzzled out what he had been told. Sun. Moon. Tide. Nagi was going to send him to the cornfield this time for certain.

  
@ @ @

Aya sat at the kitchen table in Yuuji’s childhood home and tried not to think about his own parents. Sarazawa Chieko had ordered her son to leave his ‘little friend’ (who was inches taller than her) with her for a few hours while he took care of business. Thus, Yuuji had abandoned him, for which he was going to pay dearly later.  
“Talk!” she ordered, startling him from his shy contemplation of the cup of green tea she had put in front of him. He had avoided conversation at dinner, he had avoided it at breakfast and now after washing up and getting dressed and running out of things to use as excuses, he was cornered.  
After all, you just didn’t kill your boyfriend’s mother with the knife in your boot, the small voice in his head whispered.  
He looked up at her, seated across from him with her own cup of tea. She was nothing like his own mother. She had Yuuji’s eyes, though more brown than green, and her hair was tinted red brown, cut level with her shoulders, the way he realized Yuuji sometimes pared down his sandy blond locks. And she was scary. Very scary.  
She sipped her tea and waited, making it very clear she was going to wait all day if necessary.  
He bit his lower lip and tried to come up with something.  
She set her cup down.  
Aya bleated in desperation. “Beautiful home. You have.”  
He was mortified. That came out so stupid. He bit his lower lip.  
“Funny thing,” she said. “You were much braver without your pants on.”  
He turned red.  
She sipped her tea again. “Tell me about Shinjuku,” she said calmly. “And I don’t mean that watered down, ‘nothing to see here, move along’ report the Council saw. I mean everything.”  
His mouth bone dry, he picked up his cup, gulped down the warm liquid and arranged his thoughts. This was much easier. Just a mission debrief, that’s all. He took a deep shaky breath and exhaled. “We were—in the city twelve years in the future the first time. We were attacked by—mutant men with limbs like spiders…”  
She held up her hand to stop him. “Are you on drugs?” she asked quietly.  
Alarmed, he shook his head no.  
She frowned and sipped her tea again.  
“The labs in Shinjuku, the genetic research labs,” he continued. “When the quake hit, something happened. Animals mutated. Then people started deliberately taking new designer drugs, to mutate themselves. Sometimes they are successful and can control the metamorphosis. Others barely maintain their human mind and become monsters. This was a gang trying to take over the city. They attacked us, we fought back, and Crawford was injured. He was in the hospital for weeks.”  
“And in that time you lost that rib,” she stated.  
Aya sighed. “Yes. Payment for my sister’s recovery.”  
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said with enthusiasm. “Tell me about this Dr. Mephisto.”  
He looked at her. “Crawford doesn’t want Esset to know that much about Shinjuku. He said it isn’t a place for Esset.”  
Her eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t mean you can’t tell me about this Doctor and his miracle hospital,” she wheedled.  
Aya frowned.  
She got up abruptly, startling him; but it was only to go to the refrigerator and take out a round baking pan in plastic wrap. She took a cake knife out of a drawer and put them both on the table. She sat down and unwrapped the pan, the chill scent of caramel topped custard and vanilla wafting into the air.  
Sweet cream steamed cake. His favorite dessert.  
Aya’s mouth watered despite having had breakfast a little over an hour ago.  
Chieko pointed to the dessert. “Talk.” She said.  
Aya told her everything he knew.

  
@ @ @

Nagi was silent, thinking over the information Brad had just given him.  
In that respect, he seemed like his old self. Well, his younger self, Brad corrected that thought. They were in a presently commandeered common room on the third floor of the main school building, where Nagi could plug in his laptop and not be bothered by the comings and goings of staff and students. He still hated people in general. Apparently Schuldig was not people, because he was sprawled on a sofa across the room, plugged into the stereo system and reading what looked like very old magazines.  
“It would have to be from the Shinjuku time frame,” Nagi said. “But mesh with our side.” He typed in a search on the laptop, finding a documentary on the original device’s reconstruction.  
And that was that. Nagi was gone, scribbling down notes while clicking through the internet. Brad watched him for a few minutes, then went to pull the headphones of Schuldig’s head from behind the battered sofa he sat on. “What on earth are you reading?” Brad asked, seeing the yellowed old pages printed in German.  
Schuldig held the fragile old magazine up so Brad could see the cover upside down. “’Die SS Mann’, Vol 9, 1941. Nagi was scanning them in. It’s all about being a good little citizen-soldier. Heroic experiences interviewed, life in the field sort of things. Caring for the uniform, some truly warped thinking, god awful poetry, and some weird recipes for stretching food rations. And,” he clicked his tongue disparagingly, “Lonely hearts adverts.”  
Brad shook his head. “Why?” he asked in utter disbelief.  
“Herr Griefeldt wants to republish them as moral examples,” Nagi said in a distracted voice.  
“I really can’t see the moral value of throwing myself on a grenade to save someone else,” was Brad’s acerbic response, having read one of the column’s headlines.  
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Schuldig said sourly, “You’d order someone else to do it.”  
“And then make me write the report…” Nagi faded off, writing down something. He clicked open another search screen and typed furiously.  
The door opened and Yuuji came in. “Here you are. I was beginning to think you guys had ditched me.”  
Schuldig looked up at Brad and pointed to Yuuji, at which they both laughed.  
Yuuji frowned. “What the hell?”  
“You just got fragged,” Nagi said and stuck the pencil in his teeth to type some more, then grabbed it out and started writing out a series of figures, then got up so fast his chair nearly took a dive rather than rolling away and went to a white board on a wall. He started sketching out a series of equations in interlinking circles.  
“Don’t think you’re so special, Shuu,” Yuuji warned. “My mother has Aya in her evil clutches again.” He went to the sofa and sat down, shoving Schuldig over to make room. “If she takes him shopping and to the day spa for facials and new hairdos, I’m screwed.”  
“You and Nagi can have a double wedding,” Schuldig said, moving over and righting himself. “Which one of you is going to say yes to the dress?”  
“Don’t make my blood crawl,” Yuuji stated with a shudder.  
“And you guys are not fucking up my wedding,” Nagi warned, momentarily distracted from his calculations.  
“Remember,” Schuldig warned. “If you don’t invite the fairies to your wedding, we’ll curse your first born.”  
“Speak for yourself, Schuldig. Where is the little—lovely bride?” Brad caught himself in time and smiled sweetly.  
Nagi made a pinched face, “Nice save,” he growled. “Working in the laboratory, or did you forget?” he scribbled some more and then counted off something on the fingertips of one hand, then went back to the laptop to type again.  
“What’s he up to?” Yuuji asked.  
“Calibrating the timing on the mission,” Brad replied. “I managed to get Traugott to give me some clue as to how it might work.”  
“Might,” Nagi said. “But it’s looking functional. Once we get into Shinjuku, I can plug in the data from that side and it should work.”  
“What kind of data?” Brad asked, worried.  
“Sun, Moon, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and the recognizable constellations, then factor in the Shinjuku current tidal charts.”  
“There is no beach in Shinjuku,” Schuldig pointed out.  
“And Shinjuku is nowhere near Jupiter, so what’s your point?” Nagi retorted.  
“Children, play nice,” Brad warned. “Can you rig up some sort of device we can use?”  
“Hell, I can put it in an app,” Nagi grinned up at him.

  
TBC

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

  
Yuuji walked into his parents house to find Aya asleep on the sofa, one arm over his head, the other hand on his tummy, snoring away.  
“He eats like a python,” Yuuji’s mother came in from the garage with a full laundry basket fresh from the dryer. “Half a pan of cake and he passes out.”  
“Did you put something in it to cause this,” Yuuji asked, only half joking. Who the hell knew what his DNA crazy mother could get up to?  
She smiled at him with a guilty as sin grin and said, “So suspicious, Yuu-chan. Of course I didn’t.” She lead the way to his bedroom and dumped the basket of folded clothes on the bed. “He’s very emotionally disoriented, and it’s starting to wear on him. Dragged here and there, only half aware of what people around him are saying because of the language barrier; weird shit happening right and left, and now he’s going back into that crazy disaster zone? And to top it all off, his little sister will now be older than him? You have a lot to answer for,” she shot a stern look at her tall, lanky son.  
Yuuji wasn’t having any of it, crossing his arms and looking down at her. “So?” he countered.  
Her mouth shaped a sardonic smile as she started repacking his suitcase. “Did you---?” she licked her finger and wiped the air.  
He blushed. “No, actually. When my memory started coming back, I quit drinking and smoking and my body chemistry did that without my permission,” he said defensively.  
“Too bad that silly telepath wiped that doctor’s mind. I’d like him to know what I was castrating him for,” she pouted a little and packed away his socks. “By the way, this is almost empty,” she picked a clear tube of liquid out of one of the suitcase’s inner pockets. “You’d better get some more.”  
“Mo—om!” Yuuji hurried to grab the lube and put it away, body blocking her to put the rest of his clothes in and close the suit case, locking it, as if that would restore the secret.  
“Don’t be silly,” she said wickedly. “I know all about the bird and bees. Your father and I do the wild thing three times a week at least. Which is pretty standard for our age.”  
“Mom, you’re going there; shut up,” Yuuji warned.  
She changed gears just like a woman, turning to cross her arms and look up at him again. “You need to be a little kinder to Aya-san. He’s a human being, not a pet to lead around on a leash and pat on the head when you remember to,” she walked past him.  
“I am kind to him,” Yuuji turned to look at her back, trying NOT to think of his parents ‘doing the wild thing’. Oh, gods, gross, gross, gross! Bad enough she was always reminding him of his birth. In graphic detail.  
“Be kinder,” she ordered, standing in the doorway. “And Yuu-chan, I picked his brain for information on Shinjuku. You better come back in one piece.”  
Yuuji rolled his eyes and followed her out of the bedroom, then went to sit down in the living room. He took the arm chair at the end of the sofa with Aya’s feet, where he could look at that sleeping face. Aya was definitely a good looking guy; actor handsome, and that surprisingly masculine voice—but when he slept, and all the tension relaxed out of him, he looked like some ethereal changeling.  
Be kinder.  
With all the stress lately, he had been too uptight to be anything but brittle with Aya. The whole London thing had weighed on him. The difference between the false persona of Kudoh Yohji and his real self was an ongoing confusion, like a right handed person being forced to write left handed. He knew he was not a sexual predator, but Mad Doctor Koroshige had made him one. The last thing he wanted to do, with his talent, was go around seducing people just to use as a sexual security blanket. Aya—meant a lot more than that to him. Even if he was a sort of consolation prize, Aya was someone who ‘fit’ with him. Maybe that was why it was easy to ignore him when Brad was in sight.  
He remembered how angry and defensive Aya had been that first week in Weiss. He’d gone AWOL from his old team, determined to work his way closer to Takatori Reiji, and kill him. Aya knew Kritiker was holding him back from his revenge. He’d taken out the anger and frustration he’d felt on his new team mates. And London’s failed mission, along with the all too familiar flower shop setting had probably done more of a number on the guy than Yuuji had taken time to credit. He’d been fighting his own demon, and then the sudden move in time had thrown them all off balance. Half the time he still felt like he was dream walking and would wake up to the previously ‘normal’ world. That he would be Kudoh Yohji and his real past gone for good this time.  
Be kinder.  
He sighed audibly, and Aya opened his eyes. “Hi. You’re back,” he said sleepily, a predatory smile curving his lips.  
Yuuji held a warning hand up. “My mum is still here. No funny ideas.”  
Aya smiled more at the funny ideas he was obviously having, then pouted a little, stretching.  
“You pigged out on cake,” Yuuji disapproved.  
“It was a bribe for information,” Aya flailed his legs a bit to sit up, and muffled a burp. “Either this couch is very comfortable, or I really needed that nap,” he ran his fingers through his burgundy hair to get it out of his eyes.  
“I think you really needed that nap despite the couch,” Yuuji leaned forward in the armchair, lacing his fingers together between his spread knees. “How is your German coming along?”  
Aya frowned. “What the hell did grammar do to you people to deserve what you did to it?” he accused.  
Yuuji smiled. “I was thinking instead of just falling asleep all the time we’re traveling, I should help you study. I’m sorry I’ve neglected you in that area. And a few others. You’re not just a sex toy, Aya,” he said wryly.  
Aya frowned, his hands on the edge of the sofa cushion he sat on. “Can’t I be a sex toy and a person?”  
Yuuji thought this over. “Maybe on alternate Thursdays.”  
“Die,” Aya stated, and got up to go use the restroom. 

@ @ @

“I wish this was not a good idea,” Schuldig said morosely, tossing his beige slacks at a chair.  
Brad watched them fall to the floor to be wrinkled in the morning. Schuldig caught the thought and bent to pick them up again and fold them neatly over the chair back his green shirt was already draped on. “Picky.”  
They had spent the afternoon going over every boring bit of American intel regarding Shinjuku the Esset agents working in the CIA hubs had sent home. The growing influence of China, then Japan, had put most of the American government back in the mindset prevalent in the 90’s; that Japan was somehow a huge economic threat, and China was out to take over the world. Not content with the cold war the American liberals had refroze with Russia, they apparently wanted the Bubble years back as well. Then World War 3, the religious war, had come along and left them scrambling to fight real enemies, not one they made up because it served their interests. Inside and out, the USA was flailing, and if Esset had not put paid to the big war, they would never have survived the first year of their civil war as a definable country.  
It was easy to extrapolate how the spy-factories would eventually simmer to a boil of resentment and desire to have things back their way. What else were they good for if things were going smoothly in the world and there was nothing to spy on but corporations and patents? Psychologically, most of them were just assholes who loved their jobs, the people who’s lives they destroyed be damned. And now their government was too busy dealing with its own war to be starting any more else where. Still, Japan’s refusal to allow outside scientists into the anomaly was a huge thorn in the Americans' side, and a cheap excuse for shit like this.  
“Come here,” Brad held up a hand and crooked a finger at the red head, who was now in his underwear and socks. Somehow, Schuldig always managed to be all but naked in seconds, while Brad had barely undone his tie. He was tired of playing politics and wanted to play something else.  
Schuldig smiled, knowing that look. He walked around the bed. It was a nice big bed, room for plenty of roughhousing. Esset’s Japanese Embassy had been a luxury hotel, and the suite they got was well appointed.  
“I realize how hard going back is going to be on you,” Brad said, his strong hands slid from Schuldig’s waist up to the sides of his pectoral muscles. Those amber brown eyes, lids lowered slightly, looked into his. “I want you to know that, and that I always count on how strong you can be.”  
Schuldig wished he could believe so himself, but the first time in that place had terrified him. He knew how dangerous Shinjuku could be, that things moved fast enough to outsmart even a pre-cog. Who knew what the hell they would be facing this time? Times, if the info proved true. He frowned a little, despite the reassurance; he was afraid when he let himself think about it. “But this time we can’t hide in a hotel room until it’s time to come back,” he focused on Brad’s lips, wanting to run his fingertips over them, and did so.  
“Now listen, we’re going in armed, we've already been in twice, we know the territory and we have allies,” Brad listed off, massaging the muscles over Schuldig’s ribs. “Pretty powerful ones.”  
It was making him all melty, and he suspected that was the plan, but it felt so good. His mouth twitched a little and he tried not to be so stressed out. “Okay.”  
Brad kissed him on the nose lightly. “Don’t worry too much.”  
“Just a little?” Schuldig bargained, his hand slipping around in back of Brad’s neck.  
“Just a little,” Brad agreed, kissing him on the lips. 

@ @ @ 

By mid-morning the next day, Nagi had called them all to a small conference room. Arrayed on the table were six smart phones, six analog watches, and six five by seven inch tightly printed laminated cards.  
“Now pay attention,” he warned them, well aware of their tendencies to take him lightly. “The watches are to be set with outer Tokyo real date and time and left alone. They are impact and water resistant, battery driven and should last a year. The smart phones aren’t set up for service, so what ever local service there is can’t change them. They are palm computers with the Antikythera program in them. When we get into the city, I’ll calibrate and set the program for the first time. The trick will be finding out the local time in the zone we are in as fast as possible. The cards are the instructions in case anything happens. You plug in the numbers and it spits out a return time and date. The program mimics the gears in the original device, and will predict everything from any one number in put, so if something happens, try to use one you can be very, very certain of.”  
“We’re screwed,” Schuldig said, putting a watch on his wrist. He thumb swiped the screen to wake up the phone.  
Yuuji helped Aya strap on a watch. “What if we get separated? You know, big scary monster charges us, we all break for cover type situation.” He picked up another watch and laid it on his own right wrist, buckling the strap.  
“That’s what the cards are for,” Nagi said. “The watch and the program should get you out in the Now, once I’ve calibrated it. Just head for the train station and wait for the right exit time indicated by the phone on the watch.”  
Brad was studying the card, the phone in his other hand. He closed his eyes and was silent a minute. “It works in this time line,” he pronounced. “We currently have a future in this timeline, though I can’t see what happens in Shinjuku. Something may yet change, I didn’t bother to check far, things tend to change, you all know that, but the program works.”  
“By the way,” Yuuji said a little more calmly, carefully, than normal. “My Father gave me orders. If we screw up, and get stuck, in danger of changing history, I’m to kill you all and then myself. So let’s not screw up.”  
“Scary!” Tot exclaimed in her brain shattering pitch. “Tot doesn’t want to kill Uncle Yuuji!” Despite all the cake and further education of the past five years, apparently the only thing that had changed about her was the color of her hair. It was now cotton candy pink and in two braids down her front, with two huge ribbon bows at the top, rather than panda ear buns. The elaborate mostly white and pearl eye make up, blue contacts and white frost lipstick made her look like a sugar doll. Maybe it was all the cake.  
Brad sighed dismally. “No one is going to kill anyone. Gruppenführer Sarazawa is not going to know a damned thing if things go wrong. Which they won’t, so get that out of your heads. Schwarz never fails.”  
Aya snorted. Yuuji thumped him on the upper arm. 

@ @ @

Jei, AKA Farfarello, was concealed in a hunting blind in the forbidden zone when the man came through the portal.  
The guy had a rifle, held aimed from his shoulder, turning around in a full circle, then stepping aside, maintaining full alert to the surrounding. Two more men with rifles came through. They set up a defensive triangle around the anomaly, and then three more came through. One of the men took a small yellow flag out of another's backpack and stabbed it into the ground at the current base of the anomaly. They stood there, looking around, and talking very quietly. Their body language showing them to be stressed. They were down wind, so the hunter couldn’t catch their scent, but their faces and movements gave them away. They were on high alert.  
When the area had gone suddenly silent in the quiet morning mist, ending the skitter of animals running away in the overgrown undergrowth of Chuuo Koen, Jei had known that another time portal was opening. That, and the distinct prickling buzz that sounded in the air where one was about to occur. The world held its breath and time hiccupped. What he hadn’t figured on was anyone coming through. This was the beginning, not more than a year after the demon quake, a time of confusion and madness. People, wild animals, insects and fish, zoo animals, lab animals, and people’s pets had mutated into things you just didn’t casually step into the territory of.  
Jei had been hunting a hamster.  
Weighing in at 60 pounds, they were good eating, if you could get past the teeth. Even the feral dogs stayed away from them unless they were desperately hungry. Jei had a bottle of Bulldog Sauce in his back pack, along with a loaf of bread and an onion, and sabre-teeth or no, he was going to have pit roasted stuffed mega-hamster for dinner tonight.  
He hefted the spear he had cobbled up from one of his combat knives and considered the situation. They were soldiers; armed, gear loaded, and wearing camouflaged body armor built like science fiction movie space suits. What the hell were they doing here?  
They looked around, consulting a smallish fold out map, then headed off to the northeast. With all that gear, they were tromping like elephants through the over growth. One of them said something aloud now, and—in English. “The towers look wrecked from here. I can’t see them too well through the trees.”  
“Then we’re early. Good. Maintain silence,” another one said.  
Jei hefted the spear, thinking. Then he went over to the anomaly and plucking up the little yellow flag, stepped through.  
About fifteen paces behind the abandoned hunting blind, something huge and well camouflaged shifted, stretched its tension stiffened limbs, and smelling easier meat than the white haired monkey it had been stalking, went after the new prey. In its experience, things in shells were usually more succulent.  
In their hiding place ten paces opposite of the portal, three very large hamsters looked at each other, and their squeals and squeaks were suspiciously something like snickering.

@ @ @ 

“Isn’t it about time you stopped dressing as if you were competing in a toddler pageant?” Brad flat out asked Tot as she squished her crinoline laden, knee length skirts into the private jet’s seat. She set her pink Hello Kitty backpack on the floor between her ridiculous platform Mary Janes.  
“Bor-ring,” she said brightly, unfazed by his scathing criticism.  
Brad frowned. He knew exactly where that had come from, even filtered through Nagi. He turned to give the look of blame where it belonged.  
Schuldig did the wide-eyed ‘What?’ look back at him, and bent to rummage in his carry on.  
Tot pulled down the table tray beside her seat to put Rabi-chan, a coloring book and a box of crayons on, followed by a Hello Kitty strawberry milk box, and a matching box of Pocky. Putting her ear buds in, the tinkley bright noise of some J-pop girl group leaked out.  
Beside Brad, Schuldig pulled out a thick stack of ‘GQ` and `Out` magazines, and settled down to read.  
Nagi was already tapping away at his laptop, processing reports as they came in. It occurred to Brad that he probably should be grateful the—not little anymore—guy was more cerebral than physical with his talent, though, he had become a work-a-holic.  
Yuuji sat across the aisle with Fujimiya, in full swing; fingers twined in the younger man’s, looking at him with all his attention, his voice low and hypnotically soft. Fujimiya had that stupid look on his face most people got when Yuuji was conning them into doing what he wanted. Brad wondered what he was up to now, but shied away from looking into the future to find out. He really did not want to know, he told himself firmly. Jealousy would get him no where.  
“He’s teaching him German,” Schuldig stated, his eyes on a magazine page. “And cheating by using hypnosis. Pull your nose back in and get over it.”  
Brad said “Humph,” and gave him a sour glance.  
Schuldig turned a little to look at him. “Are you going to be a misery the whole trip?”  
Brad scowled and sat back to try to get his mind on something more constructive.  
“I thought you didn’t want to rule the world,” Schuldig turned a page and sneered at an article on some rich ass actor who was getting moldy, and yes a little fat, around the edges.  
“Mind your own business,” was Brad’s response.  
“Though I do like the bit about throwing people to the lions and tigers,” Schuldig turned another page. “But for minor traffic violations is going a bit far.”  
Brad remembered how often he had reminded the ding bat red head that ‘no, he could not kill them all’, and gave up. He had better things to think about than world shaking revenge.  
It was going to be another long trip. He counted to ten, then unzipped his laptop case and picked up where he had left off catching up with the news-now-history of the last five years. 

@ @ @

Schuldig breathed in the night air of Narita airport, arms spread and head back like some one in the pristine forest for the first time. “Ah, smell that air. Tokyo,” he proclaimed. In actuality, it smelt intermittently in wafts of diesel fuel, jet fuel, the ocean, fried food cart offerings and cold damp concrete.  
“Drama queen,” Nagi said, dragging two rolling luggage cases behind him.  
Schuldig turned to watch him. “You really have to stop with the cisgender sexist remarks, Nagi-kins” he held up a waggling finger. “Before someone beats the brains out of you with a sign that says ‘End Hate Speech’ badly nailed to a two by four.”  
Nagi snorted and headed for the waiting van. “The last ‘Anti-Fa’ that attacked me got the shit squeezed out of him.”  
“Un!” Tot agreed, following in his foot prints. “He pooped his pants,” she giggled.  
“You’d think those morons would know the difference between a fascist and a national socialist democrat,” Schuldig grumbled yet again; but it was a bone of contention to the loyal German. “Since they think they know everything.”  
“What the hell am I seeing?” Yuuji was stopped short, looking up over the row of small planes and jets along the runway parking area. Something dark and hulking loomed there.  
“SDF mechanized armor,” Nagi answered over his shoulder after a glance up. “One of the main reasons Japan cut ties with the USA,” he added.  
“Um, huuuge,” Schuldig said, seeing them now, too. Big blocky shadows behind the bright lights of the airport. Five of them. “Why are they here, instead of on some military base?”  
“Why not?,” was Nagi’s answer. “Actually, they are all over Japan. The police force and military are combined now. They keep swiping ideas from the old school Germans,” he added ruefully.  
Walking backwards now, and awkwardly steering his rolling suitcase, Schuldig grabbed Brad’s coat sleeve with the enthusiasm of a five year old. “Can we swipe one for Shinjuku? Can we? Can we? Can we?” he pleaded.  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” was the answer. “Remember what happened to the helicopters?”  
“Too fast, too big,” Nagi said, taking the keys from the waiting attendant and signing the clip boarded paper work. He held them up, dangling them tauntingly, his teeth momentarily catching his lower lip in a wicked smile. “I get to drive.”  
Brad set his jaw, ready to draw the line—or gore the matador, more like.  
“Oh, give it up, Brad” Yuuji drawled. “He’s old enough, and has the talent to deal with anything.” Nagi had beeped the locks and Yuuji opened the back to put his suitcase in.  
“Don’t start,” Schuldig linked his free arm in Brad's, still sulking in disappointment over the 'mechs'. “It’s cold, I'm tired and hungry. Let’s just get to the Embassy, eat tons of sushi, and sleep til real morning and not be such a control freak.”

@ @ @ 

Fourteen hours later, Yuuji decided it was a good thing to have a powerful telekinetic on the team. As the designated driver whose talent would not cause him to black out going through the anomaly barrier, he was wondering how much longer the damaged rail bridge would hold, and if Nagi’s talent was really strong enough to save them if it gave out. He made a mental note to see a dentist about his clenching his teeth so hard.  
Not surprisingly, they had gone from well before sunset in Tokyo to full night on the other side, a rough estimate of the time they had first gone in and found themselves twelve years in Shinjuku’s future. The closer to the time of day of the earthquake that had caused the anomaly, the further along they seemed to end up in Shinjuku's future.  
Yuuji guided the SUV toward the nearest safe looking kerb and parked it. The Train Station looked as wrecked as ever, if not more so. The now independently libertarian city had not done anything except to fence it off and labeled it “Keep Out” in English and Japanese; though the picked dry skeleton left hanging in a carnivorous hallucinogen plant trailing the building wall pretty much got that message through in all languages. The skeleton’s droop jawed grin was an oddly amusing sight. The pants bunched around it’s ankles, belt undone gave away what he had thought he had been up to with the plant’s mental projection.  
“We need to find out what time it is here right now,” Nagi stated.  
“Well, let’s just grab someone and mug them for it,” Yuuji said with only a hint of sarcasm, looking around at the dark and empty street. “Maybe that guy is still wearing a watch,” he pointed to Mr. Grinny in the bush.  
“Telepath,” Brad stated bluntly. “Vertigo. Going to be sick in a minute.”  
Nagi slapped a purloined airline barf bag into his hands. “Not in the rental,” he ordered.  
“8:42 pm.” Schuldig said after a moment, having found some one to mentally mug. He was holding onto his head, despite the yellow bandana tying it on, the other hand clamped back down on Brad’s thigh to shut out the burst of noise until he could pull himself together.  
Nagi set his phone first. While he was setting the others, the inevitable Shinjuku night shift police officer descended on them.  
Unlike the plain clothes lady cop they had run into before, this male one wore a black uniform with the old fashioned meiji-era gold stripes on the lapels, a cap with the chrysanthemum badge, and like most vampires, the criteria for being a successful predator in his race, he was literally drop dead handsome. He held up his ID to the driver side window as he folded his wings away to where ever these creatures managed to hide them. Vampires just did not turn their backs on people.  
“Oh, thank goodness,” Yuuji muttered, grateful it was not the over excitable Officer Takeda, who while a lovely lady in her own right, seriously wanted to eat him alive. He rolled down the window and turned on the charm. “Good evening, officer….”  
“You’re either out of your minds, or outsiders,” the vampire said coolly, taking out his ticket book and clicking a pen. “Which is it?”  
“Probably both,” Yuuji replied with a meek smile. Damned ‘No Parking’ sign. He saw now that some one with a really bad sense of humor had arranged the skeleton’s left hand to point to it, but the man eating plant now obscured the sign just enough to make it invisible to first glance.  
“License and registration,” the cop intoned. And then ‘it’ reached the cop’s highly sensitive nose. His pupils dilated and he practically salivated, suddenly intensely focused on Yuuji.  
Yuuji sighed. Okay, so he was every vampire’s idea of wagyu beef teppanyaki. Damn it. “Slow down, Officer. We’re Outsiders. We need to contact someone in charge. Officer Takeda can vouch for us if Det. Kabane isn’t on duty? Please,” Yuuji added.  
The cop licked his lips. “Sure, after you step out of the car and show me some ID, Sir,” he grinned, fangs showing like a great cat.  
Yuuji gave him a stern look. “No,” he said slowly and firmly, putting all his talent into it. “Because then you’ll want to search me, and it will all go very wrong and your boss will have words with you, Officer—Sujita.” He read the cop’s name tag.  
Officer Sujita’s pupils normalized again, as he realized he was dealing with someone who wasn’t going to fall for his mesmerizing talent. “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he purred, disappointed, giving Yuuji the ‘I’d like to lick you like a lollipop` look. “Now what’s this all about?”  
Brad had rolled down the window from the second row passenger seat, now that his vertigo had settled. “It’s imperative that we contact Det. Kabane, or who ever is in charge of the city’s security. There’s going to be an attack on Shinjuku from the outside. They may already be in the anomaly dome at somewhere on the time line in here.”  
Nagi was getting mad as hell. “I’ve got two phones set, but I can’t do anything else if I have to hold Fujimiya back,” he snapped.  
Startled, Yuuji turned to look at Aya, who was attempting to visually gut the flirtatious vampire, straining against an invisible grip on his body. Yuuji frowned seriously at Aya, who pouted and sat back to sulk the minute Nagi let go of him. There went Yuuji’s sex life yet again. At least for a few hours.  
Yuuji turned back to the cop. “Listen, Officer, there are a bunch of people who plan to get into Shinjuku and out in time to change the past in the outside world. We need to speak with someone large and in charge. Either your boss or the head Vampire guy, what’s his name.”  
“Yakou-sama,” Brad supplied. “We’ll start there. Tell his Highness Brad Crawford would like an audience with him.”  
The cop had a good look at Brad, then sobered up, stuffed his disappointment, and took his radio off its velcro holder on his shoulder. 

TBC

 

  



	3. Chapter 3

  
Jei stepped out of the portal and looked around, then bent to pull up the little yellow surveyor’s flag the foreign team had put on this end. Maybe they had done their homework, but the flags would do nothing to keep the portals from closing, or moving, or for that matter, shunting people into terminal situations.  
That was why Jei liked being here. Being alive. The day to day challenge of staying alive, not sitting around bored out of his mind unless there was an assignment. And even then, he didn’t always get to have any fun. This attitude was also why he knew where most of the portals went like the back of his hand. He simply stepped through, prepared for anything, and if one shut behind him, there would eventually be another.  
He sniffed the air, and identified Year Nine. Car exhaust levels still low. Fresh poured tarmac. Takoyaki. If he couldn’t have roast hamster, that would do for now. He checked his pockets for change and hiked out of the fenced off ex-park to the food vendor’s carts in front of the old Tokyo Met building. There was a line out the door, patients waiting for the miracle performing doctor.  
As the cook drizzled first takoyaki sauce, then mayonnaise, then added a sprinkle of shaved bonito on his double order, a familiar scent proceeded a familiar face.  
“Farfarello,” Detective Kabane took a stool next to him at the cart’s little fold down counter and held up his fingers for a similar double order of the fried octopus fritter balls. “How’s hunting? Two Sapporo, please,” he added beers to the order and waved a finger toward Jei, indicating one was for him.  
Jei took the two flags out of his back pocket and set them on the counter between their plates. “Any idea why someone dressed for all out combat would be puttin’ surveyor’s flags in the forbidden zone?” His Japanese still had that Irish lilt to it, despite having spent 2/3s of his young life in Japan.  
Kabane pushed back his incongruous Uchikake over coat and pulled out his wallet to pay for the food and drink. “I don’t have a clue as to why it’s still called the ‘forbidden zone’ when everyone and his elderly mother traipses through there.” He picked up the flags by the sticks and looked at them. They were brand new, un-faded, the wire stems not rusted one bit. “Hmm,” he set them down.  
Jei stabbed a ball with the little wooden two-tined fork provided, and savored the fresh taste of seafood in its cocoon of fried batter. “Armed for bear. Americans, I think. Six of them. Going through the time gates. They wanted to be sure they were ‘early’, talking about the city being in ruins.”  
Kabane looked at his presented food order with relish and had a mouthful himself before saying anything.  
The chef was a bit amused that both his customers were missing a left eye. One the chief of police detectives; the other, one of the floaters that avoided the civilized part of the city for the jungle Chuuo Koen—Central Park—had become. Who knew why they chose to keep their deficiencies when Dr. Mephisto could easily replace the missing organs; but some people had weird ideas.  
“’Armed for bear’,” Kabane said thoughtfully. “Hunters maybe?” Crazy outsiders thinking to bag a trophy from the weird mutants and historic beasts that turned up in the temporal anomaly? Only last week he had had to deport with extreme prejudice a bunch of Greenpeace/PETA freaks who had snuck in and wanted to turn the whole city into a freaking game preserve. As long as the animals stayed in the forbidden zone, they could have their place in the city, but not roaming down the main streets like sacred cows. You’d have thought the ass hats would have learned something when that climbing rose bush strangled and ate that velociraptor or what ever it was, basically saving their lives, but some people were Darwin-deficient.  
“Fekkin’ shite hunters if they are,” Jei stated derisively. “Stompin’ about in full armor, reeking of gun oils.” He had another ball, then half turned to look at Kabane. “Military op, more like. I got a bad feelin’ about it.” He had a deep swallow of the beer and burped.  
“Doesn’t exactly make me feel all warm and cuddly inside, either,” Kabane frowned. “Armed in Japan without permission, in Shinjuku without permission, and doubly damned, Americans. The Mayor has had it with the blasted Americans.”  
“Want ‘em dead?” Jei offered.  
Kabane looked at his profile as his jaw worked. Normally he would have to say ‘no, are you mad?’ but yeah, that wouldn’t exactly work here. “Get me one alive,” he said. “I want answers.”  
Jei nodded, intent on his meal.

@ @ @

Shinjuku: Year 18.  
The police station was doing a slow business tonight. There were few ‘customers’ being lead past the meter and a half tall hard plastic undefinable creature of a cartoon character mascot beside the front entrance. One arrestee was a two headed and very drunken man who kept arguing with himself and trying to punch himself out. The officers had duct taped a bar towel crown on one head to keep him from head butting him self unconscious after handcuffing him. The desk sergeant was not amused. “Has he been read his rights?” he demanded over the yelling.  
“Well, yeah,” one of the officers said.  
The desk sergeant, with bland resignation, pulled a little spray can out from under the desk and hit the guy in the faces with it. The combatant slumped unconscious into the arms of the arresting officers. “Joe Doe,” the sergeant typed in. “Personal effects?”  
They handed the clear plastic bag of possessions over and dragged the guy off to a cell.  
Five minutes after they were told to wait, Schuldig ducked in horror behind Brad. /Don’t let it get me,/ Schuldig pleaded in Brad’s mind.  
An obviously gender dysphoric—um—person—in a too tight pink satin dress, white fur stole, big blond wig, dramatic make up, and high heels, with ‘her’ somewhat muscular and tattooed arms handcuffed behind her back was frog marched in protesting that ‘a girl had to make a living some how' in Aussie accented Japanese. At the front desk the lady cop on ‘her’ left hauled up the front of the miniskirt to display a brace of tentacles around a rather—um—well—an orifice--where the usual stuff was definitely not. The ‘person’ protested in a falsetto tone this invasion of privacy violently and obscenely, tentacles closing tightly over the--hole.  
Nagi had grabbed Tot’s shoulders and turned her around to distract her with a hasty conversation about a video game.  
Aya looked slightly greenish, but it might have been the fluorescent lighting. Yuuji rested a protective arm around Aya’s shoulders and tried to think of something technically detailed, like a miniature heat seeking missile that could be fired from a hand gun.  
The desk sergeant looked grim and started typing in the booking.  
Brad half turned his head. /Don’t be such a wimp. Of course it’s not going to get you./  
/You don’t know what that—thing was arrested for./ Schuldig’s mental voice was a low growling whine.  
/And I will thank you not to tell, or show me,/ Brad retorted hastily as the creature noticed him, looked him up and down, then gave him a rapacious wink over its shoulder as it was pulled off to the depths of the jail.  
A young detective (who despite his nicely tailored suit was thankfully not a vampire) came out of the elevator and walked over to where the small crowd sat waiting. “Crawford-san? Dt. Kabane will see you in his office now. Um—all of you?” he looked at the six of them.  
“All of us,” Brad stated, his voice as close as he would ever come to a squeak, and lead the way to the elevator.

@ @ @

Kabane sat behind his desk in the ‘open plan’ detective’s office, his thin cigar lit, the room’s air grey with smoke. Tokyo’s laws against smoking certainly did not apply here, where some people breathed fire. He dismissed the ‘newb’ with a wave of his hand. “Ah, Crawford-san and his happy band of killers,” he growled sarcastically. “Prince Yakou was in a panic, so maybe you should start from the beginning and tell me what this is all about,” he put out the cigar and turned on a little desk fan aimed at the ceiling to clear the air. His eye swept over Tot and the eyebrow behind his patch raised a bit, but he kept his bland expression. Crawford, Schuldig, and Sarazawa, whose names he remembered, had snagged chairs to sit in, but the other three, the swordsman Fujimiya, the doll (was she human?) and the younger fellow, who looked somehow familiar, stood.  
Crawford looked annoyed. (Nothing new there. Even when he had been helpless in a hospital bed, Kabane had the impression the man was the sort who got his way or else—and things were not going his way.)  
“We’ve had word of an attack of sorts on Shinjuku,” Crawford began in a careful manner. “A CIA black ops team is going to be, or has been, sent in to the city to find a way out in time to change history at a point that will be advantageous to one of the American political factions. This may involve serious danger to the city. In the past, the USA has advocated treating Shinjuku like Chernobyl. Either bomb it to hell or concrete it over, what ever. But my suspicions are that once they achieve their goal, with or without the U.S. government’s approval, they will burn the bridge behind themselves. The problem is, my precognitive talent does not work reliably in Shinjuku’s time lines, and I can’t see clearly enough to counteract them.”  
Kabane gave him a good long stare. The information went along with something that had been troubling Kabane for a while now. A sort of deja-vu thing. He’d wake up mornings wondering where the information had come from, then remembered things he was certain he had not really—remembered? And always connected with the man Crawford had left behind. He resisted the urge to light his cigar again. The tall, thin blond was watching his ashtray like a man who had quit smoking.  
“And you’re on our side why?” he asked.  
Crawford’s expression did not change. “It just starts in Shinjuku. The damage these people could do could burn the entire planet to ashes.”  
“I don’t care much about the outside world’s politics, but if that’s your reason….” Kabane sat forward now, resting his arms on the desk. “The man who didn’t leave with you the first time you came in; Farfarello. I don’t quite remember when it was this started, but he’s been popping in and out of the time vortices, tracking a bunch of guys dressed up like spacemen, and as he put it, armed for bear—could be for a couple of years now, or maybe just days,” he gave a little shrug, dislodging a few of his tidily rolled dreadlocks from over his shoulder to its front. “None of my men have seen them, but a few civilians and informants have reported seeing the same described people in the streets in the early mornings, or very late at night. Only recently, we caught them on video at a conbini, breaking and entering, taking food and medical supplies. They may have been doing this in earlier years and not been caught, but this was ‘modern’.” He pulled over a laptop and typed into it, waited a minute, then turned the screen for Crawford to see the video cam recording. “This was two days ago. If that matters at all, given the circumstances,” he said dryly. “Its damned difficult to put out an APB covering the last 18 years in concurrence.”  
The vid showed the interior of a chemist’s/convenience store, the door glass breaking, then an internal folding gate’s padlock being broken open with bolt cutters. Two people wearing face mask balaclavas and dressed in high tech body armor stepped in over the broken glass of the door frame. Moving in team work, they filled two backpack with things off the shelves as they went, in and out in little more than minutes.  
“Medical supplies,” Crawford said. “Some one must be wounded or ill.”  
“Only two,” Sarazawa said thoughtfully. “They left watchmen outside, or the team split up? The smallest team the Amis habitually use is five. If one man is injured, that leaves two to carry him, and two to guard a retreat; or two to mind a prisoner.”  
“Farfarello reported six came through the portal the first time he saw them back in Year Three,” Kabane said. “They were marking the portals with surveyor’s flags. Farfarello’s trying to find out what they’re up to. I told him to bring one in alive the other day, but so far, there’s been nothing. The time jumps he’s making are screwing with my memory,” he tapped his head. Then he gave up and relit the cigar anyway, leaning back in his chair and exhaling a cloud of smoke with a deep sigh. “The vampires are keeping an eye out for them, naturally, but these guys aren’t afraid to use the portals, and people here aren’t quite that crazy.”  
“They haven’t figured out the timing yet,” the svelte young man standing behind Crawford mused, and it was then that Kabane realized—he was the little telekinetic, all grown up.  
“And they can’t do anything more until they do,” Sarazawa told Crawford. “They’re just hopping from one year to the next, trying to get out in the right year. Using the more dangerous vortices instead of going in and out of the city.”  
“Some people just don’t have the ability to put two and two together,” Nagi said smugly.  
“If that’s what they are up to, why not leave the wounded man behind?” Schuldig asked. “He can’t be wounded that badly then, but he will slow them down. If he were, this isn’t some third world country, they would take him to the hospital.”  
“Mephisto Hospital would alert us to the situation,” Kabane stated. “Just like the outside. They’re here under suspicious circumstances for one, and Mephisto doesn’t tolerate threats to the city. He’d find out and break them down for spare parts before we even had a chance to question them.”  
“Maybe they are under orders to complete the mission or die trying,” Crawford frowned slightly. “But if they don’t succeed in the time period they’ve been given, will the Amis give up? And the only reasonably safe way in and out of the city is over the Toei Line rail bridge, and that is failing.”  
“Blow up the bridge now,” Sarazawa offered. “Lock them in here.”  
“That won’t work,” Nagi said. “The bridge will still exist in the outside past for years after the quake, let alone the eighteen years they would have from this side.”  
Crawford shook his head. “This is one hell of a mess.”  
“There’s another problem,” Kabane said hesitantly. “Kind of hard to overlook when the damned things are shitting on your picnic, but those pterodactyls, giant birds, and other things that come popping up now and then are from well far back in time, not just to before the Demon Quake.” He knocked the ashes off his cigar. “They could get out a hell of a lot earlier than even they anticipated, get snapped up by some thunder lizard, or fall into a volcano, and we wouldn’t know they were gone for good. And well, what exactly do you propose we all do about this?” He rested the hand with the lit cigar in it on the desk and looked them over. “I can’t send my people chasing through time. I’m fairly sure if we still had a union on this side, there would be a protest and an internal investigation.”  
The red head slumped suddenly in his chair, a look of dismay on his face. “Damn it, this is insane,” he stated, looking at Crawford. “I liked it better when we were the bad guys and fuck the damned world.”  
Crawford drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, his eyes focused on some distant thought. “We have to flush them out, somehow.”  
Sarazawa reached over and with a tight frown, pointedly moved the desk fan to blow any tobacco smoke away from himself. “Find Farfarello and ask him what he’s dithering about?” was his suggestion to Crawford.  
Crawford’s eyes lowered behind thick black lashes as he thought some more.  
“There is—one thing,” Kabane put out the butt of his cigar with a methodical grinding in the ashtray. “Madam Neuvenburg. The city’s ‘official witch’,” he smiled sardonically. “It’s worth a try.”  
“Yay!” the girl clapped her hands together and bounced on her toes, “We get to see Doll!” she exclaimed.

@ @ @

Madam Tonveau Neuvenburg, the younger sister of Galena who had saved the city and replaced her after her untimely death, was as round as she was tall, and her face was not that of a jolly woman. More like an irritated bull dog with out the prognathous lower jaw. She looked over the tall young men, and girl, who had filed into her shop well after sundown with a jaundiced soul behind her cold eyes. Having taken in the cut and style of the black haired one’s clothing, she immediately totted up her fee in the higher range. “It’s late. I was just getting ready to close. State your business.”  
The girl squealed suddenly, startling her, as Doll came in to the shop room from the back hall. The pink haired apparition grabbed the smaller creature up in a hug sure to pop out her eyes if they hadn’t been screwed in tight. The automaton bore it well, however, and was eventually set back on her little heels, but her hands remained trapped. “Doll-chan, how are you!” the girl asked in genuine delight.  
“Well, and yourself, Totto-san” Doll said politely happy. “It has been a long time.”  
“Has it?” the girl`s fake blue eyes were wide with stupidity, or those contacts that made the eyes wider, which ever, but Tonveau had other distractions to deal with.  
One of the men, the one with a long shaggy mop of copper-flame hair and a way of moving that reminded her of nothing so much as an alley cat, was roaming around the shop, peeping closer at bottled things, and grimacing when something in one peeped back at him. “Is this real?” he derisively held up a rough blown bottle with a cork in it marked ‘Dragon’s Teeth Powder.’  
“Schuldig, stop clowning around,” the male fashion model warned coolly. “We’re here on business.”  
“In that case,” the red head put the bottle back, and pulled out a gun, aiming it at the Ukrainian born witch. “Is this real?” he growled. “All this fake shit.” He waggled the gun to indicate the shop/workroom, then drew down on her again, breathtakingly robin’s egg blue eyes mocking her. The shop was practically a fairy tale illustration labeled ‘witch’s lair’, right down to the bubbling cauldron on the hearth. Madam Neuvenburg knew how to set a stage.  
The sandy blond dressed in a t-shirt, lizard jacket and low cut slacks like something that had escaped the 1960’s, sighed loudly. “Make him stop,” he said sardonically from just behind the obvious boss, Yakuza chief, or what ever he was. Trouble with a capital T, in any case. Then there was the quiet young man in the plain black uniform, and yet another red head, this one darker enough to call burgundy, bundled up in leather, a katana at his side, with the eyes of a viper. But Doll seemed to know all of them and was not troubled to move in any way to shield her mistress, the little brass hearted brat.  
“Who are you people and what do you want, crowding up my shop like this,” Madam Neuvenburg demanded, ice cold, her ham sized arms crossed over her massive mono-bust. The price had just doubled, no matter what it was. “And make it fast, it’s late and I was just about to close up.”  
“My name is Crawford,” the fashion plate said smoothly. “Det. Kabane recommended you, Madam. We need someone to see through the small time vortices that pop up in the city.”  
Her little mouth tightened. “For what reason? And call off your moggy before I castrate him.”  
The man’s eyes went sharply to the red head. The oni rolled his eyes and put his pistol back in the concealed holster at his waist.  
The girl dressed like a lace cup-cake on legs was busily chatting with Doll in a corner. Madam Neuvenburg wondered what that whispering was all about. “Why?” she stated again. There was something about this guy that suddenly reminded her of the men in black uniforms from her childhood in the Ukraine. All shiny boots, immaculate posture, and the smile that sent people by the tens at a time to their deaths as if it were nothing more than pest control.  
The man rested his hands in the pockets of his black trench coat. “A small cadre of American CIA special ops are running loose in Shinjuku,” his tone was dark and precise. “They are trying to use the time gates, or vortices, or what ever you like to call them, to go back and get out of Shinjuku just after the earthquake. Their goal is to change things in the outside world. How, I have no idea, but this is my perception of matters. They will then destroy Shinjuku to prevent anyone else from achieving the same.” He raised his chin a little as he spoke, and she sensed there was something deeper in that ‘perception’ bothering him. A man with hurt pride, or at least dented. Or was he play acting for her sympathy?  
AHA! The memory came back now. These were the ones who had come before! The ones with the comatose girl, who had shut down the Spider Gang. Outside adepts. “What makes you think I can see through the vortices?” she challenged aggressively.  
“I don’t,” he smiled coolly, “but Det. Kabane suggested you might. If not, well then,” he shrugged slightly, and started to turn back to the door.  
He made it a fraction of centimeter, before she called halt to it. “I hope you brought money with you,” her piggy eyes narrowed as she grinned at him and her very round cheeks rose.  
“Nagi,” The man stated with out even looking around.  
The quiet youth stepped forward and set a briefcase on the work table. He unlocked and unlatched it, opening it for her to see.  
The thing was full of money, not only bundles of paper yen with that loose, non-consecutive look about the edges, but stacks of little gold ingots as well. It was quite heart warming, really. “That will do,” she said, and started to reach greedy hands for the case. The lid snapped shut and locked, though the youth had not moved a muscle.  
“No, a price will do, and one within reason,” Crawford stated smoothly. “After all, you are Shinjuku’s official witch,” he smirked down at her. “You wouldn’t want people to think that you had put too outrageous a price on saving the city your sister died for.”  
How the hell had he known about that? She swore under her breath, meeting those cold brown eyes.  
“Witch or no witch, I will slice and fry your brains like those of a cow, my greedy little piglet,” the red head was suddenly too close to her, even though he was on the other side of the room a moment before. She blinked. He was back on the other side of the room, leering at her with that wide grin.  
The blond spoke again. “Madam Neuvenburg, can you do it or not?” Apparently this was the sane, reasonable one.  
She frowned. There was something in his voice that made her feel as if something were pressing her to agree, but gold was gold. “Alright, I’ll try,” she said. “But I can’t make any guarantees. The vortices come and go like dust devils, and so far, no one has been able to predict them.” She wondered where that had come from. Honesty was never her best policy. Perhaps it had been too long a day.  
“All we need to predict is when and where the people we are after will come through them,” Crawford said.  
She thought about this. “That, maybe,” she said. “Come back in the morning. And not too early. I need time to think this out.”  
“All right,” Crawford agreed, after a moment’s thought. “We will be back around eleven.”  
“Some one really needs her beauty sleep,” Schuldig stage muttered rather nastily as he followed Crawford out.  
Madam Neuvenburg was strongly tempted to curse him with a seventy-two hour balding spell.  
He half spun to look at her and suddenly—she couldn’t remember the spell! He grinned widely. “I warned you,” he said, then followed the others out the door.  
“Doll,” she snapped. “What the hell was that?”  
The little mechanical maid tilted her head, the picture of Victorian doll innocence. “People more evil than you, Madam?” she offered sweetly.  
Tonveau growled and stomped over to an overstuffed shelf to search for and pull out a book, riffling through the pages until she found it. The balding spell. After trying to re-memorize it for five minutes, and the words refusing to stick, she slapped the book shut and shoved it back into the shelf, swearing again under her breath. That just yanked the price up another quarter percent!

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

  
Reichsführer SS Griefeldt set down the cordless phone on its base and frowned in consternation. “Well, that didn’t go well,” he said in mild exasperation. “I doubt very much any of us will be invited to Christmas in Florida this year.” And that was putting it mildly, if sarcastically.  
“I would advise you not to check Twitter for the next 24 hours,” one of the other male council members said dryly.   
“Well, they can’t say we didn’t warn them,” Griefeldt laced his fingers together on the council room’s table top and looked around the room, making sure he had all their attention. “Notify all Esset members, active and non-active, to be on full alert for sudden inexplicable changes going back over the past five years to the original Shinjuku super-quake.”  
“Dear gods,” one of the others said in mild alarm. “What if the Elders are restored to life by any of this American time buggery?”  
Griefeldt’s empathy talent picked up the cold chill passing through every member in the room as that thought sunk in. The ensuing burst of panicked babble necessitated the banging of the gavel to bring the council back to silence.   
He looked around the room at the angry, scared, or worried faces. “The quake coincided with the ritual,” he reasoned quietly. “Without the quake’s affect on Shinjuku, the Americans can not achieve their presumed goal of changing the timeline. There is no possibility of the Elders being restored. Now let us all get back to work.”

  
@ @ @

“Things might go a little smoother if you weren’t so rude,” Yuuji admonished Schuldig as they walked to the SUV.   
“My team, my rules,” Brad reminded him calmly, unlocking the SUV. “If it were necessary to rein him in, I would.”   
Schuldig stuck his tongue out at Yuuji and got into the front passenger seat.   
While the others got into the car, Brad and Yuuji kept watch on their surroundings, including the dark sky. The night seemed quiet, but that might only mean everything that was prey was being very quiet on purpose.   
When the doors were shut and locked, everyone, except possibly Tot, concealed a frisson of relief now that they were ‘safe’. Of course, that didn’t mean some huge thing wouldn’t latch onto them from above and fly them off to drop like a tortoise on a rock. But it ‘felt’ safe to be inside the Mercedes SUV, and that was what counted.   
“Where to now,” Yuuji asked from the seat behind him as Brad started the engine.   
“I suppose there is no getting around it,” Brad answered, his eyes searching the road ahead. Even underneath the normal seeming bright streetlights, one expected something horrendous to jump out at any minute, but that was Shinjuku. “Mephisto Hospital,”   
Schuldig let out a quiet groan and banged his head on the dash board a few times.

  
@ @ @

Brad stood before the admittance desk, facing down his worst nemesis.   
It had been a damned long day, despite the fact that in their time, it was only a loss of a few hours. Shinjuku was going on midnight, and he felt it. Was this getting old, he wondered.   
“Good evening, Nurse,” he said to the pale woman. As usual, her ash blond hair was up in a french roll, her white cap with its black band neatly pinned into place. She wore a pair of glasses on her face to dispel the creepy reflective silver overlay on sapphire irises. Despite the difference in features and apparent age, this was Traugott’s parent self, the Kami he had made the deal with to stick Esset with ‘a demon’. Well, she was. A demon of sorts.  
“Welcome back, Crawford-san,” she said with the sort of smile a shark might give a tasty surfer. “I do hope it’s nothing serious. Enlarged prostate, perhaps? Something stuck where it shouldn’t be?”   
He frowned. And her sense of humor was entirely more vicious. The first time he and his team had been in Shinjuku after the quake, there had been a rumor that the Tokyo Municipal building complex had defaulted to Mephisto because he was able to stop it from eating people. Eating people because some how, the spirit of the place had gone all ‘grudge’ over not being able to do its job: that of being there for people. Mephisto might be the head doctor on duty here, but Nurse was the hospital.   
“I think you know why we’re here,” he said, irritated.   
“Do I?” she played innocent, giving him the sort of look that said the psych ward orderlies were on call. With Taser batons.   
He frowned more. He did not draw his gun.   
She let it go just far enough and then bared her teeth at him, claiming victory. She pressed a button on the desk console. “Chief, Mr. Crawford and his—business partners—are here to see Doctor Mephisto.”  
“Sensei is in surgery at the moment,” came the harried reply from the overworked ER chief.   
“Understood,” she said and focused on Crawford. “I’m afraid it may be a wait. There is the lounge, and the visitor cafeteria, but it is on night shift mode. There are sandwiches and vended beverages until the morning kitchen staff arrives at 5 am.”  
“Cafeteria,” Nagi opted. “My caffeine levels just went critical.”  
/Why do you let that—thing—talk to you like that?/ Schuldig asked mentally as they headed for the cafeteria.   
/Because she can reduce me to a pile of biological waste with a single thought if she ever has a mind to,/ was Brad’s curt answer.   
“Oh,” Schuldig said aloud, then grabbed his arm again, the hospital’s noisy mental combination of fear, pain, complaining, blaming and begging so loud he felt like passing out from it all.   
“Do you want to visit your sister while we’re here?” Yuuji asked Aya cautiously.   
“I don’t think she would be awake right now,” was his answer with a little frown. “Maybe when this is over.”  
Yuuji felt a slight relief. He was not sure why, but sharing Aya with the girl was a strain on his temperament. Maybe because it reminded him that in a very oblique way, he was sort of responsible for their parent’s death, even if Takatori had ordered it.   
Behind them, Nagi was looking at his phone, the one programed to fix their entry and exit times. So far, the program was behaving. He drew a breath of relief and looked at Tot. “Brad better stand up for me at the wedding,” he said, apropos of a previous conversation.   
Tot held up Rabi-chan. “If Uncle Brad doesn’t stand up for Nagi-kun, Rabi-chan will kick his ass,” she smiled happily.   
Nagi chuckled. He still wasn’t sure what was going on in her head half the time, but no matter what Brad said, ‘sparkly’ was what he wanted. “We need to get Rabi-chan a suit and tie,” he said seriously. “He can’t come to the wedding naked.”  
She blinked at him, then turned the toy rabbit around to look at him. Rabi-chan had been refurbished over the years with fresh stuffing, a new set of plastic eyes and nose, and had his mouth lines re-embroidered. She still clung to him as any other young woman would a purse. But the rabbit was most definitely naked.   
Nagi knew she had shut down into thinking land, and took her arm, leading her down the hall way. Rabi-chan was in for it. That meant he was off the hook and could probably get away with his dress uniform, instead of some outrageous Victorian dark goth prince thing.

  
@ @ @

Three hours later, Mephisto listened, elbows on desk, long elegant fingers half laced before his lips, to Crawford’s explanation of why they had returned to Shinjuku. The silence in the huge ‘office’, more a terrarium, continued for moments after Crawford had finished. Then he drew a deep breath. “I have been expecting something like this,” Mephisto said mildly. “Given the circumstances, it was bound to be attempted by outsiders at some point.”   
Brad had been gradually increasingly distracted by the large, ornately covered book on corner of the doctor’s desk. It radiated a—‘condensed time-ness’—was all he might describe it in words as. Normally, inanimate objects did not register on his talent. He was a precognitive, not a psychometric. It was very odd, because the Doctor, an obviously living being, was not visible to his talent, and the book was very distracting. It drew his talent like a magnet.   
Mephisto; sensing something was up, rested a casually protective hand on the book, and gave Crawford the sort of look one might give a small child one simply knew was contemplating a huge no-no. “I did make a study of the vortices some time ago,” he continued. “But they have proven to be no more predictable than the weather. The only certain thing about them is that they remain in Shinjuku at any given point in time that they appear.”  
Nagi snapped his fingers. “What if the vortices some how vent off the anomaly, keeping it from becoming an entirely closed system and collapsing on itself. Like sun spots and solar flares.”   
“God, I hate physics,” Yuuji grumbled, rubbing a tired eye. “Especially physics that are just making themselves up as they go along.”   
Mephisto smiled indulgently. “It is a valid theory. On that note, I suggest you all get the remaining night's rest and return to Madam Neuvenburg in the morning with all your wits about you. If these persons show up here, we will deal with them.”   
“Sensei,” Nagi said, as humbly as impatience would let him. “Please, may I see your research notes on the vortices? If you still have them?”  
Brad looked at him as if he had gone mad, but Mephisto smiled blandly. “Certainly,” he got up and walked over to a plant cluttered book shelf and took down a soft bound journal the length and width of a magazine but three times thicker. He held it out to Nagi. “Drop it off before you leave Shinjuku.”  
Nagi accepted it with both hands. “Thank you, Sensei,” he said. “I will be careful with it. If I find out anything new, I’ll make note of it and slip the pages to the back.”  
“Good luck,” Mephisto said.   
Brad wondered if he always behaved as if there were a lot of things he just wasn’t telling. He forced himself to turn his back on that damned book.

  
@ @ @ 

The desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency informed Crawford his money was still no good there. The Mayor had ordered a permanent expense account in place for Crawford after his crew had destroyed the mutant spider gang. (The Mayor also managed to keep his crazy wife from throwing herself in with the deal, but that was a domestic issue.)   
/Probably figuring we would never be back to run it up as many times as we have,/ Schuldig thought sourly at him as they headed across the elegant lobby for the bank of elevators.   
/Ah, well,/ Brad responded. He wasn’t about to complain about free luxury. /That book on Mephisto’s desk—did you happen to get anything from it?/  
/It’s a big old book, is what I got from it,/ Schuldig was mildly irritated by this distraction from his own need to complain.   
“Yuuji, that book on Mephisto’s desk,” Brad said aloud. “Any impression?”  
Yuuji leaned on the side of the elevator cabin as the doors closed and looked at him with a lazy gaze. “I noticed you were sort of stuck on it. The doc got protective of it; you saw how he laid his hand on it when you started eyeing it. What’s up with that?”  
“Something—weird about it….” Brad frowned.  
“I think you’d better leave it alone,” Nagi interjected. “He was watching you like a hawk, Brad. If anything happens to that book, Nurse is going to give you a hell of a lot more than an enema.”  
Tot giggled.   
Brad pouted slightly. “I was just curious, that’s all. Why is he so protective of it, and yet he loans Nagi his research notes on the time vortices?”  
“Why not just ask?” Yuuji said.   
“Because that takes all the fun out of things,” Brad smiled at him teasingly.   
Aya noted said smile and added it to his list of reasons to push Brad down the nearest open hole, whether it was a manhole or a crevasse.   
“Fujimiya,” Schuldig warned aloud, “thinking like that will get you nowhere. I might not be able to kill you, but I can outwit you.”   
“What did you do now?” Yuuji asked Aya.   
“Nothing!” Aya stated fiercely.   
“Brad, stop giving Sarazawa the eye,” Schuldig crossed his arms as the elevator doors opened on their floor.   
“I wasn’t,” Brad went on the defensive.   
“There were eyes all over the place,” Schuldig accused sullenly, shooting a look at Yuuji.   
“I’m too tired for this and so are you,” Brad grumbled, taking out the key card for their suite and looking at the number. “Here we are,” he said, stepping across the hall to the door. “So let’s just call room service, wash up and get some sleep.” He made it very clear this was an order.

@ @ @

Shinjuku Year Three.   
The ruins of the Kitashinjuku Library were like a modern art version of an ancient temple reclaimed by the jungle. Vines had twined through the stacks, ran along counters, shelves and reading tables, and broken through computer screens. The scent of earth, flowers in lush bloom, and an under tone of decay filled the once tidy and air conditioned building. Where the floor had cracked open, and the fallen roof allowed, small trees had taken root, bushes grew. There were still a few scattered and moldy books laying about, but pools of ashes pointed to where people had taken shelter after the quake, burning what they could to keep warm, or to cook scavenged food.   
To the six who had been sent to change the world, the world appeared to have already changed beyond comprehension. Patches of jungle in the midst of shattered sky scrapers, strange animals roaming thru them, and even stranger people made it seem like they had left Earth entirely for another planet. The briefings hadn’t covered enough. Maybe in this case, they could never cover enough.   
“Hold still!” Nerit Tzon hissed at her Israeli colleague, unwrapping the bandage. It crackled, dried blood flaking.   
The wound under it had suppurated. It was just a little gash in his calf from a passing thorn tip; but in the past twenty-four hours linear time, it had doubled in width and now looked like to be necrotizing.   
She pored the bottle of hydrogen peroxide over it. The stuff foamed up like crazy. Two more times, she cleaned out the wound. The last time, the stuff only fizzed a little and she could see raw, red meat deep in what had been such a little scratch. She refrained from gasping.   
“Maybe you missed some of it,” Jenkins offered over her shoulder.  
She shook her head. “It came out clean, I checked. There must have been a defensive chemical on it. It looks like….” She stopped herself. Leverson, his brown eyes feverish, was looking up at her. She smiled grimly. “It’s clean. It looks like it's getting better. You know how things look worse before they get better. Let's get this wrapped up again.” She opened a tube of antibiotic ointment and squeezed it in.   
Leverson winced. “Stings,” his voice was harsh with pain and dehydration from the fever.   
“Good, that means it`s working,” she uncapped a liter bottle of Pedialyte and gave it to him. “Drink all of this.”  
He drank, making a face at the strong mineral taste. He took the two pills from the anti-biotic packet she handed him and swallowed them. She hoped to hell it would work.  
Jenkins and Alvarez, two of the three Americans, paced the little alcove they had cleared out and barricaded with pieces of furniture; nerves taunt, every small noise setting off their internal alarms.  
Brandower, the ostensible leader of the American side, was going over the map again, and making notes, a half finished MRI pouch on the floor beside him, forgotten and gone cold again. Like the other two, Brandower was SEAL, but he had some science background. He was trying to map the time gates.   
Frankel, the third of the Israeli team was convince this was bullshit. They had marked the ‘gates’. Stepped through, then gone back, and the flags were gone. Taking cell phone photos had only confused matters. Plants were either too large or too small to match the time they had gone through in the first place, and if and when they could line them up with the photos, the flags were gone.   
“We’re in deep shit,” he stated, and not for the first time.   
Leverson, a little more alive now, objected. “Stop that.” He was the leader of the Israeli team, after all, and it was his duty to keep them on track.   
Jenkins and Alvarez had been chosen because they had been transfer students to Tokyo for a year back in junior college. They had some Japanese language and a basic knowledge of the area before the quake. Tzon, Leverson and Frankel, MOSSAD operatives, were trained to speak and read fluent Japanese. Which was good, because Tzon was able to pick out tolerable additions to their food supplies, and identify the medications they suddenly needed.   
It had been Frankel’s idea to grab the first newspapers they had seen on stands after one ‘jump’.   
They now knew, for instance, that ‘The City’, as its citizens styled it, measured its new age by years past the quake, the same way the Japanese used to measure by the current emperor’s reign. They knew that a cure had been found for the spontaneous mutations that had been plaguing the city like a common cold for fifteen years since the quake, and a simple inoculation would prevent most variations. They knew (unfortunately) that the Mayor’s wife was a bona fide kook. That supposedly (and this was still up for debate) there were real vampires, one of which was on the city council. That animal control was still working on the pterodactyl problem.  
In short, that the whole place was a god damned nightmare.   
They didn’t know the half of it, but it was enough to make every one of them question, quietly or aloud, if this mission was practical, or sheer fucking insanity.   
After the first twenty-four hours, every one of them quietly held the opinion that this was going to take more than a covert ops team with the skills to hack into computers and character assassinate a presidential candidate, as well as destroy the time vortex over the Japanese city. But the whole mission was a deep dark secret. If they succeeded, no one would know. If they died and failed, no one would know. And while each and every one of them considered this to be in line with their patriotic duty, not one of them knew the true goals of the one who had spent money and manipulated their orders into being.   
TBC 


	5. Chapter 5

Crushing Butterflies 5

  
Brad’s eyes snapped open and the premonition induced dream spun down the time line without him. He did not often wake from the sort of nightmares he knew were triggered by his premonitions any more, but it left him feeling a despair he would never, ever admit to, internally or aloud. Visions of the future if he did not succeed, which would not come when he was awake, flooded into a sleeping mind left unguarded by over-tiredness. Only the years his talent had been hobbled down to five to ten seconds helped him realize in REM level that as vivid, as real as they were, they were only remote possibilities, and he no longer woke drenched in sweat and screaming. Still, his heart pounded like drums, and he had to breath deep to calm himself.  
Schuldig opened grumpy eyes and looked at him accusingly from inches away. “That wasn’t fun.”  
“Bleh,” Brad said, and turned on his back to get away from the red head’s sour morning breath. As late as they had been up, no one had bothered to brush. He sighed, a fleeting thought kicked to the kerb.  
“We could go do it now and start all over again,” Schuldig purred in his ear, having caught the thought anyway.  
“By then I wouldn’t be feeling so ‘needy’,” Brad said darkly.  
“What ever happened to sex for sex’s sake?” his lover persisted.  
Brad had to smile, despite his disinclination to be amused for the sake of being amused. His arm still trapped under Schuldig’s shoulders, he toyed with what he could reach of copper red locks, contemplating the ceiling. “I’m getting old.”  
“Who would have ever seen that coming?” Schuldig was slightly sarcastic. “I, on the other hand, am still full of youth and friskiness.” He pressed his hard on against Brad’s thigh.  
Brad snorted mildly. “Tempting. But what’s in it for me?”  
“A very happy and cooperative telepath. For at least a day,” Schuldig reasoned.  
“Cooperative?” Brad asked archly.  
“You know how difficult it is for me to think clearly, especially with all my circulation tied up in the wrong place for coherent thought,” Schuldig’s dick nuzzled at him again.  
Brad turned to look into those blue eyes. “Only a day?” he smiled.  
“Maybe twelve hours. You know how fast my metabolism is,” Schuldig demurred.  
“Go brush your teeth, you stinky brat.” Brad got out of the bed on his side to do the same.  
He did not think about the nightmares caused by his visions. 

@ @ @

Shinjuku, Year Three

Brandower was half kneeling beside her when Tzon woke to his gently shaking her shoulder. He put a finger to his lips, then spoke quietly. “Leverson’s bad. It’s gotten into his blood.”  
She sat up, looking around, her mind coming to terms with their location. The dawn was just turning the sky pale through the breaks in the ex-library’s walls and ceiling. She got up and went over to kneel beside Leverson.  
While he was her commander for this mission, she did not know him that well. But she was worried for him. If one little scratch could do this, what else was in this place they had not been prepared for?  
He looked bad; the dark lines running through his skin from under the bandage were proof of blood poisoning. The antibiotics had done nothing. His fever was high, his clothing and the blanket under him wet with sweat.  
“His kidneys and liver must be shut down by now,” Brandower said.  
Tzon was drawing a blank, it was such a shock, his going so fast from something so little. But they had their orders. Leverson was a dead man. There was nothing more she could do, she wasn’t a doctor, or even a nurse. Her specialty was infiltration. When the time came, she would present as an attractive young woman, a professional who would look good in the front office. When it wasn’t tied up, her wavy dark brown hair fell down around her shoulders; olive skin, liquid brown eyes, symmetrical features, a slender, physically fit body; all would over rule any facetious questions of her ability to type. Once they were back in the past, she would use those looks to get closer to their targets.  
“We’ll have to leave him,” Frankel said quietly behind them.  
She looked at Brandower. Though it really wasn’t his choice, she wanted to make sure the Americans were ‘in control’ in case they got any ideas about accusing the Israeli’s of having their own agenda.  
He nodded.  
She had to be sure. She lifted Leverson’s eyelids, one at a time, checking his pupils reaction to the light now coming in through the broken ceiling. The whites of his eyes were a sickly yellow. He was still breathing, but he was comatose. He would go quietly, she hoped. She looked in the bag of medical supplies for an ampule of morphine and prepared an injection, giving him as strong a dose as she dared. As his heart rate slowed from its feverish race, she nodded and stood.  
They had their orders. 

@ @ @

Semi-conscious, Yuuji fumbled on the bedside table and then wondered why the hell he was looking for a pack of cigarettes. He groaned a little, then shifted, opening blurry eyes to see a landscape of burgundy colored hair. None of his limbs were trapped under Aya, and a gentle snore still emanated from the human chipper shredder.  
Escape! his brain said.  
He braced himself, counted to three, rolled off the bed and ran for it. Grabbing some things out of the suitcase, he beat it to the bathroom and locked the door; half panting, half smothering a laugh.  
He was just getting into the shower stall when he heard a fist hit the door. “Damn it, Yuuji, let me in!”  
“What?” he called, getting under the lovely hot water spray. “I’ve got soap in my hair, can’t hear you!”  
Another thump on the door.  
Too bad that: a. the hot water, like every other one in Japan these days, was on an instant heater, b. that cold water thing never worked anyway; horny was horny. But at least he could have a shower to himself. He drowned out Aya’s complaints by singing loudly. It was a relief to scrub off the past few day’s travel and—other things—happily knowing that Aya would be pissed either way, but at least this way, he, Yuuji, would be clean.  
When he finally unlocked the door, freshly shaved and blow dried, Aya was leaning on the wall next to it, arms crossed, evil purple eyes of doom at Death Con 7. Yuuji looked down. “Pee hard on?” he grinned, stepping aside.  
Aya turned into the bathroom and slammed the door on him.  
Yuuji had to admit, he did so like playing with explosives. 

@ @ @

Shinjuku, Year Three

They’d left him. Just like that, to die. Not very nice of them, team member and all.  
Jei slithered down a vine from the two story up ceiling; let go six feet from the floor, and landed like a cat.  
The guy smelled bad with the poison, but for now, he was more alive than dead. He just looked bad, by Shinjuku standards. Oh, but he was fair huge. Getting him to a gateway that would take them to Year 18 would be a nuisance. And by the looks of him, leaving him to go get help was not going to bring him back alive enough to save.  
Jei sighed, irritated with his sense of right and wrong. Then he bent down and grabbing hold of the bastard, heaved him up into a sitting position. Looking around, he saw wheels, and went over to push the vines and crap off a book cart. He bashed it about to get the dirt and weeds out of the wheels, then pushed it back and forth until it rolled freely. It would do.  
He tied the guy onto the cart like an Old American West bounty over a saddle, using the thin vines he could find that were safe. Then he braced himself and started pushing.  
The broken sidewalks and dirt paths did not help the small wheels meant for polished floors and unpadded carpets, but it was better than having to lug the guy most of the way. 

@ @ @

Nagi downed coffee like it was all he was going to live on for the rest of his life. Brad noticed the carry out cup as he got into the SUV. Nagi noticed him noticing and smirked. It had not stunted his growth. (Of course, he was never going to admit to the growth hormone shots he had wheedled out of Sarazawa Sensei.)  
Brad got into the driver’s seat with out any complaints from anyone. Schuldig tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Sarazawa looked grumpy, Fujimiya looked smug, and that was the end of that tale.  
“I think I might have found out what causes the time vortices,” Nagi said. “I just need to run a few tests.”  
“Is this going to involve us going through and coming out in some volcano ridden pre-historic hell hole?” Brad asked.  
“Mmmmaaaayyyyy-beeee,” Nagi allowed cautiously. “But it won’t be a problem if we all go in and come right out together.”  
“Time vortexes inside a time anomaly sounds like a scientific bear trap to me,” was Yuuji’s opinion. “Oh, that looks very much like a big dangerous thing capable of biting my leg off, I’ll just go stick my foot in and make sure I’m actually seeing what I am seeing,” he drawled.  
“Farfarello is doing it,” Nagi countered.  
“Farfarello is insane,” Schuldig stated without opening his eyes.  
“But he’s doing it, and surviving,” Nagi insisted. “So let’s find him and get him to show us through.”  
“Beats going to some crazy old witch,” Schuldig opened his eyes to look at Brad. “Farfarello is just crazy. She’s bats.”  
Brad reached over and picked a loose red hair off Schuldig’s t-shirt front. “Are you—shedding?” he asked curiously.  
Schuldig panicked and felt his head, then tugged his fingers through his hair and looked at the results. “Damn it, Brad!” he complained, relaxing again. There was no more than the usual few hairs that came out on his comb or when he pulled his bandana off.  
Brad laughed evilly and turned the SUV toward Madam Neuvenburg’s street. 

@ @ @

Doll opened the door, and before she could squeal and grab the adorable little automaton, Brad held out a arm to bar Tot. “Nagi,” he said.  
Nagi took Tot by the shoulders and set her back a bit, looking her in the eyes. “Mission,” he warned firmly.  
Tot pouted a little and then settled down into an ‘I’ll get you later’ readiness. Doll smiled gently and then addressed Brad. “Madam is waiting for you.” She stepped aside.  
When they were all in the shop, Doll shut the door and latched it, putting the ‘closed’ sign in the window.  
Tonveau looked them over like a bad tempered cook just told at the last minute that there were going to be another fifty guests at an ‘intimate dinner party’ back in Victorian times. “Must there be all of you?” she asked imperiously.  
Brad simply gazed down at her with an arch look. Schuldig grinned like a lunatic. The others just waited for orders.  
She huffed and went over to her work table. “Adepts you may be, but you’ve already admitted your powers don’t work reliably in Shinjuku. Mine do.” She slapped both hands down on the hard worked wooden table, looking at them. “I may not be able to tell you every time these people step out of a time gate in the past, but I can tell you the future.”  
Tot saw a sort of look cross Doll’s otherwise enigmatic face, and elbowed Nagi, tilting her head at Doll, who suddenly had somewhere else in the house to be. Nagi looked at Brad. /Schuldig? Knock-knock, anyone home?/  
The red head did not turn. /What?/ he answered silently, irritated. Brad had told him to keep his hands off, so he could spy on the witch’s thoughts.  
/Doll just did a sort of ‘WTF’ and ducked out of the picture,/ Nagi said. /If the android thinks Neuvenburg’s pulling a fast one, does Brad?/  
/Brad,/ Schuldig whispered quietly. /She might be playing us./  
/We’ll see,/ Brad thought back at him. /She’s right, though. Her magic may be reliable enough here. If her attempts to see the future confirm my visions, that’s enough to go on./  
Schuldig’s response was a mental sigh, and he passed the decision along to Nagi.  
Nagi was more for tracking down Farfarello.  
/After this,/ Schuldig said in his head. 

@ @ @ 

Shinjuku, Year 10

Leverson woke two days later, though he didn’t know it at the time.  
He was laying in a hospital room, on a bed, with clean white sheets and all the requisite tubes, wires, and machines going beep. He blinked, then tried to sit up. He was strapped down securely. A pinging bell noise started to sound off.  
He wondered what the hell was going on. Then the door swung open and a man and woman came in. Maybe it was the medication but they looked like twins? Pale ash blond hair, blue eyes, pale complexions, dressed in white hospital uniforms. The woman stood to one side, while the man checked him over with the expertise of the harried doctor; shining a light in his eyes, taking his pulse, flipping back the blankets to examine his torso and leg. He took a good look at the leg Leverson vaguely remembered he’d had a cut or scratch on, and was now sporting a row of bristly black stitching.  
“Why am I tied down, Doctor?” he asked in English.  
The man looked at him. “You speak English?” he said with an accent. Swedish? Norwegian?  
“Well, yeah,” Leverson said. “Where—am I?” he asked.  
“Mephisto Hospital. And I’m afraid you are tied down because you are under arrest.”  
Leverson frowned. “For what? I’m an Israeli citizen, I want to speak to someone from the Israeli embassy….”  
The man shook his head slowly. “There are no foreign embassies in Shinjuku.”  
Now he remembered, and he realized just how deep he might be into it. “A solicitor then, a lawyer…,” he persisted.  
The man shook his head slowly. “We don’t have those either. You might as well relax, Mr. Leverson. An officer will be here shortly to take your statement.”  
“Red Cross,” Leverson stated.  
The doctor smiled a little and turned. “He’s healing nicely, Nurse. You may take over.”  
“Yes, Chief,” the woman said.  
“I demand to speak to a lawyer, you have no right to hold me here,” Leverson stated loudly at the doctor’s retreating back.  
Nurse stood beside the bed looking down at him. “There, there, Mr. Leverson, there’s no need to fret. You’ve had a nasty case of blood poisoning and your body needs to recover from the damage done to it,” her voice was professionally calm and soothing, and yet some how, he felt the blood chill in his veins. There was something weird about her eyes. A reflective silver sheen the glasses did not hide at certain angles. Her hand was cool as she took his wrist and consulted her watch to test his pulse the old fashioned way. She then tidied up the bed sheets the doctor had disarrayed, and went to adjust the blinds.  
He couldn’t quite remember what he had been going to say, when she turned and looked at him again, and the creepy mirror glow was even more obvious in her eyes in the shaded room. “Now rest. We want you all nice and healthy again,” she said with a cool little smile.  
And he couldn’t help wonder nice and healthy for what? 

@ @ @

Tonveau took a cloth covered shallow bowl, about half a meter in diameter, down from a shelf and put on the table. Into this, she proceeded to pour water from a demijohn jug. It smelt slightly off, like standing water from a swamp. She poured carefully, not splashing a drop outside the bowl. Despite the odor, it was crystal clear to the black glazed bottom of the bowl.  
On the table there was a line up of bottles, all hand blown, with waxed cork stoppers. As she worked, dropping in a little something, a small measure, a few drops of each bottle, she muttered under her breath. Then she put the cloth back over the bowl in such a way that it would not dip into the bowl. Over this she spoke a little louder in her native language.  
/If that’s a spell, I’m an Olympic swimmer with his dick cut off,/ Schuldig sneered in Brad’s mind.  
/Do shut up,/ Brad thought back at him.  
She took the cloth off the bowl and the surface of the water was clouded, then resolved into an oily sheen, reflecting jewel tone rainbow flashes. She bent a little to look into the bowl, muttering some more at it.  
And the water showed an image, as if from a CCTV camera. Somewhere in an overgrown part of Shinjuku, an oval shimmer hung in the air. People dressed in combat armor stepped through it.  
Brad watched from the opposite side of the table. “Alright, impressive. But what is the date and time?” he looked into her eyes.  
“Only five?” Yuuji commented, watching the scene in the bowl. “And one of them is a woman.”  
Tonveau gave Brad a smug smirking look and murmured and gestured over the bowl again. The scene swooped away, to a street where there was a shop window with a clock and a news stand in front of it. “There you are, this Wednesday, the 23rd, a little before 2:45 pm.”  
Brad straitened up and his eyes went amber gold as his talent went to work. His hand clenched on the table as he struggled to keep focused on the time line he was chasing, despite the eddies and interference of Shinjuku. He saw the same scene, from a different angle, as if he were standing in front of the time gate. Saw their faces, the woman grim, the men just thinking their own thoughts. “One is missing,” he said, coming back to the moment again.  
“The injured one,” Yuuji looked at Brad.  
Brad didn’t answer, but looked at Tonveau. “The location?” he stated.  
She held her hand out. “When I get paid,” she stated.  
/Got it, for what it’s worth,/ Schuldig informed him.  
Brad smiled into the witch’s watery blue eyes.  
/Near the old bus station,/  
“That’s only one. I want three more. Then you'll get paid,” Brad told her firmly.  
She frowned and snatched her hand back. “The scrying pool can’t…”  
“Can be used as often as you like with in the hour of it’s mixing,” Schuldig countered her lie before she finished telling it. “Get on with it, you old cheat,” he growled.  
Yuuji frowned, but kept his mouth shut. Brad’s team, Brad’s call.  
Aya had taken up a position beside the door way to the back of the shop, acting relaxed, but more than ready to take a head off if he had to.  
Nagi and Tot stayed near the front door. Nagi was working on something on his other, connected phone—a large, almost tablet sized thing.  
With ill grace, Tonveau went back to her bowl and this time, it took less time to come up with the required three more visions. Each time, Brad checked them against his own talent, working against the tidal conflicts of Shinjuku’s time anomaly. Each time, Schuldig pulled the place and time from the old witch’s mind and memorized them, then shared the memory with Brad. Yuuji was surprised to find the information shoved into his head as well, as crisp and vivid as if it were his own experience.  
Nagi noted the information on his phone, then took the other one out to check something on it. “Hmm,” he said, locking it and put it back in his pocket.  
“Nagi,” Brad said.  
Nagi looked up, then took the briefcase he was in charge of up again and set it on the work table. He unlocked it, waiting.  
“Your price,” Brad stated.  
“One million yen per scrying,” Tonveau stated aggressively. “Not a yen less. In gold.”  
Brad nodded coolly, and Nagi counted out the little ingots, then added paper, and dug out some change from his own pockets. “At today’s market rates,” he said, laying the change on the table.  
Tonveau frowned, but there was nothing she could do. He was not about to let her have any extra rather than part with another ingot and over pay.  
“Don’t you want to know the places?” she asked as Brad tipped his head to indicate the others were to leave and turned to go himself.  
Schuldig laughed softly, low and evil. “We did not cheat you, despite your attempts.” He tapped his head, then turned to follow Brad.  
Tonveau gathered up the gold and cash with a sour expression. Despite the fact that she had been fully paid, she still felt as if they had gotten the better of her. 

TBC


	6. Chapter 6

“We work backwards,” Brad said. “That means the day after tomorrow.”  
Back at the hotel suite, Nagi had ordered a card table and a map from room service. The exit points, dates and times were now marked out.  
“When you add the flow of the river,” Nagi tapped the spot on the map where it poured into the chasm, “And the under ground 'streams' caused by the flow through the old sewer system….” He pulled another map out from under the city one. “You get currents of running water under the city, crossing at some points.” He looked up at the older men. “Running water has always been thought to affect magic. I’m not sure the magic part is anything more than fantasy, but water currents affect everything on the planet. These vortices form and then 'flow' slowly along until they collapse, like dust devils or water spouts in the wind currents. And, the river flows completely around the city before it drains back into its old bed and heads for the sea.” He tapped the map where this occurred. “Look at the vortices we have locations for.”  
“Well, I’m not seeing it,” Schuldig said, disinterested in the whole science lecture thing. The only time he forbore to listen to this sort of blah, blah, blah was when Brad was off on a tangent in that sexy voice of his.  
Brad laid a hand on the table and leaned a little to get a better view of the map.  
Yuuji set a cup of coffee next to Brad’s hand and then sipped one of his own, looking at him curiously.  
“Where’s mine?” Schuldig asked in a very polite voice with a dangerous look in his eyes.  
“On the counter,” Yuuji informed him. “I only have two hands.”  
“If we stay much longer in this place, you may find yourself with two more,” Brad said. He was still studying the map.  
“Don’t say things like that,” Yuuji protested mildly. “Coming from a precog, that’s scary.”  
A hand latched onto the back of his slacks waist band and yanked him back a little. “Why don’t you come sit down with me?” Aya growled near his ear from behind.  
Yuuji bared his teeth and widened his eyes in a mock scared face at the smirking three at the table, and went to sit down obediently.  
“Pussy whipped,” Schuldig whispered in German, fairly certain Aya was not up on those words yet.  
Brad put his finger on the last in the timeline of the vortices the witch had given them. “This is the last date, but not the last in distance on the crossing water currents. They look random to me. We know they will be there at that time, but not if they have formed yet.”  
“Which is why we take the last one first, plenty of time to stake it out and see what the cover is,” Schuldig stated. “This is too complicated, we are not here to do mad science, we are here to kill some assholes and leave!”  
“Do get your coffee and shut up,” Brad said mildly, still focused on the map.  
Schuldig huffed out an irritated breath and went to get his mug of coffee.  
“It looks random now, but with this information, we can pin point where they form,” Nagi insisted. “Look at the current markers and the date and times our quarry come out.”  
Brad pursed his lips slightly. “They flow toward the edge of the city,” he realized.  
“We have almost two days,” Nagi said, indicating the last target. “Let me put the coordinates from Dr. Mephisto’s notes on the map as well, and see what turns up.”  
Brad picked up his coffee and straitened to have a long swallow of the warm liquid. “Do it, then. The least we can do is turn it back over to him. In the mean time, we can try to find Farfarello and get some more insight on the targets.”  
“I don’t see the point,” Schuldig told him.  
“The more information we have the better prepared we’ll be for any eventuality in the future,” Brad looked at him. “Stepping out of the time gates, you won’t be able to read our enemies coming until they are right there in front of us, so you wont have their plans in advance, nor will I be able to see their future moves until they leave the vortex. You’re so used to changing your mind on the turn of a second, you’re like a fox on a rabbit; but in this case, we can still be surprised, and these rabbits are armed and have more than instinct to go on.”  
Schuldig, unable to argue with this, or be arsed to think up a reason to, drank his coffee. He just wanted this over with and to be out of this place before he went mad. Out of physical contact with Brad, his head was filled with an unholy din, and where normal city life had its issues, Shinjuku was constantly triggering his fight or flight instinct with the horrors out there.  
At this point, as if to give his paranoia a high five, there was an angry screech from the bathroom and the sounds of violence being committed.  
Nagi got up to go see what was going on in there, while the others tensed in anticipation and grabbed out their guns.  
Nagi came out. “Cockroach,” he held the thing up by a hind leg. Though obviously battered and dented like a small Italian car, it still twitched and fought weakly to escape. It was a good six inches long. “Someone call maintenance,” he added in irritation. Tot stood behind him, furious, steel shanked umbrella at the ready in one hand, holding up her towel with the other.  
“Crush it,” Schuldig shivered.  
“No, I’m going to make sure they don’t have any excuses,” Nagi held onto the thing.  
“Ay-ya,” Yuuji warned.  
There was the ‘shink’ of a katana being slid the few inches back into its sheath. Aya eyed the thing with malice enough to make it burst into flames. Yuuji hoped he didn’t catch some stupid mutagen while they were here to make that actually happen.  
Tot swore violently in a normal and unlady-like voice (which was oddly disconcerting coming from her) and slammed the bathroom door, locking it as if that would prevent any further bugs from getting in to where this one had obviously been.  
“That thing is prehistoric, isn’t it?” Yuuji asked, daring to look a little closer.  
“They all are,” Nagi said, making it clear how stupid he thought the older man was.  
“Nagi,” Brad warned out of habit.  
Nagi rolled his eyes, “I doubt there is anything to put this thing in until they get here, is there?”  
Schuldig set the suite phone down. “I don’t think a paper take out cup would hold it. They are coming right away. Just don’t get peckish and nibble on the evidence,” he grinned evilly, remembering that little incident a few years ago.  
“Nagi,” Brad warned again before his premonition of a vase of flowers flying at Schuldig’s head could come true.

  
@ @ @

Shinjuku, Year 12

Farfarello ducked the bulldozer the clean up crew was using to remove the quite dead giant tentacled cat fish being chain sawed up in the street before the hospital, and stood on the pavement outside the main doors for a moment. He considered the whole time paradox thing and figured, screw it.  
He was just entering the hospital reception room when Det. Kabane swept out of the elevator, hands in the pockets of his heavy silk coat, deep in thought. The detective stopped short, looking at him.  
“Det. Kabane,” Farfarello ducked his head in acknowledgement.  
Kabane had just been speaking with Crawford about this missing individual. “I take it our quaint little town suits you,” Kabane said.  
“Aye,” Farfarello said.  
“Keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble,” Kabane growled at him around his unlit cheroot, then strode past him to go get the smoke he had been dying for.  
Farfarello got in the elevator and went up to what he hoped he remembered after all this time was the right floor.  
Crawford was still paler than normal at this point after the mutant spider attack, and it occurred to Farfarello that it would be quite easy to just pull the knife out of his boot and slit the man’s throat.  
Crawford’s eyes opened half way and the thought passed. “Farfarello, what are you up to now?” he asked in a low warning tone.  
“Can’t stay,” the white haired youth said. “Just checking in.”  
“Oh,” Brad closed his eyes again and lay back on the pillow.  
Farfarello decided not to attempt to tell him at this point. For one thing, the cagey devil was too doped up to remember. He smiled a little and shook his head at the man’s hubris. Then he left the room, closing the door quietly, and walked back to the elevator.  
Nurse was waiting for him when he stepped out. “Mis-ter Far-fa-rel-lo,” she said in that cool, stern voice. “You did not check in at the desk before entering the main part of the hospital.”  
“Was just visitin’,” he grudged, hands in black jeans pockets, shoulders high and tight with guilt.  
She gave him a very knowing look, one that would have made a Mother Superior cringe. “You mustn’t mess with the time lines.”  
He considered this. “What if it means something awful would happen if I didn’t?”  
“That is not the question,” she stated. “The question is how does anyone keep track of anything if things keep changing.”  
This sunk in. He nodded. “Aye,” he smiled a little.  
She tilted her head to the side slightly, “Now out.”  
He sloped out like the rangy, good for nothing teen thug he was, rather enjoying his existence at the moment. He’d seen what Nurse could do to those who broke the hospital rules. He wasn’t so sure about breaking the rules of Nature, though. And this gave him something to contemplate.

@ @ @

Doctor Chieko Sarazawa lifted her head from the microscope, frowning despite the fact that she knew it would give her lines.  
She had hoped there was a glitch in the computer program, but on using the old fashioned electric scope, the truth was proved. For the second time, the little red stained spermatozoa were dead as could be. A bit of shock had done nothing to stir them up. “Dead, dead, dead,” she said aloud in irritation, drumming her fingers on the edge of the work counter. She had waited five years for a replacement sample, and not only dead, but the individual DNA strands had turned to so much primordial soup in their little cells. She smacked a fist down on the counter, almost but not quite startling the other workers, who were used to her fits, then got off her rolling bar-stool, striding to the lab door. Swiping her card through the reader, she stepped out, and tossed a mental coin.  
Complaining to Herr Griefeldt would be premature. Really, all the man could do would be to offer her herbal tea and sympathy, and then smack down on Crawford like the wrath of God, possibly triggering the destruction of Esset entirely.  
What she needed was to nip this bud off at the nuclear level. And there was only one way that DNA could have been unstrung like that, without the radiation levels that would have pretty much killed them all had there been any such thing in the biology lab or even on the grounds.  
She had taken a step right. Now, she executed an about face and marched left, toward the school chancellor’s office. Not to speak to her husband, he was out on a case; but to the one being in this place who suspiciously mucked about with physics with the soigne insouciance of an ‘Act of Nature’.  
Frau Traugott looked up from sorting yet more yellowed old files on her desk when Chieko entered the office like a gust of wrath. “Frau Doctor,” she said pleasantly, laying the stack of files on top of a nearby cabinet and indicated an arm chair arranged in front of the desk.  
“No, I will not sit,” Chieko stated. “You,” she held up an accusatory finger, an European habit the Japanese would deplore, “have been messing with my work!” she declared.  
Traugott looked innocently concerned, and moved to sit down behind her desk. “How so?”  
“Don’t you dare play innocent with me,” Chieko snapped. (After all, an expert had honed his skills on her.) “DNA doesn’t unravel itself!”  
“Ah,” Traugott said, recognition dawning. “I’m afraid that was not mere messing,” she said calmly.  
“You could have been a little more subtle,” Chieko’s hazel brown eyes narrowed waspishly. “None of the other projects in the same container have been destroyed. What is going on here?”  
Traugott looked serious. “I’m afraid that this particular ‘project’ has been suspended by the subject.”  
“You what?” Chieko was shocked. “He didn’t. Why would he do such a thing? And for that matter what gives that little misery the authority to do so? I have been working with that DNA since….” She quickly did the math. “Crap, that’s my life’s work he just ash canned for crap sake.” She had to take the chair now.  
Traugott sighed mildly. “Doctor Sarazawa, Herr Crawford specifically requested that his DNA remain off limits. And while I personally regret the implications of a man choosing the death of his bloodline, the request was a contract.”  
Chieko’s mouth become a hard line. “Well, then,” she stated, putting her hands on the arms of the chair to push herself up out of it, despite the fact that she was still shaking with anger and very much wobbly kneed. “There are other ways of getting around that and any other law…”  
Traugott held up a stalling hand, looking down at the desk top. “I’m afraid it’s rather iron clad. No one bearing his DNA is to survive conception.”  
“ARGH!” Chieko smacked both hands down on the desk top in frustration. “How could he!” she demanded. “He would not have even existed if it were not for me! I took over and corrected all the defects from the outdated material, I made the decision to let the blue eye gene lay dormant in exchange for the better memory combination, I worried day and night over that gestation as all but one failed, I threw myself in front of the Elders and begged for that child’s life!” she was devolving into ranting and tears. “A stable class A precognitive talent who survived where the others had imploded! Failures, all of them, and I succeeded!” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her shaking hand.  
Traugott took a box of facial tissues out of the desk drawer and shoved them across the desk. Then she sat back and laced her fingers together loosely on the desk to wait it out.  
“So he’s slightly, maybe not quite a complete psychopath,” Chieko allowed, blowing her nose and mopping her face, but the tears kept coming. “But he’s magnificent! Even though they had to and managed to find a way to cut his talent down to less than ten seconds, I gave Esset the precognitive to survive the future!” she grabbed more tissues. “And now my work is for nothing? What if he gets himself killed out there!” she demanded. “For gods sakes…He’s the mortal equivalent of the Spear of Longinus! With him, Esset can not fail. Mortal, Damn it! It’s his duty to breed! One way, or another!” her fist came down on the desk again.  
“You might want to look into why almost all your top male talents are homosexual,” Traugott advised calmly.  
“That’s beside the point!” The sore spot had been struck again. The females were fine, definitely no problems there, but the males, almost 50% were attracted to their own sex, a much higher percentage than the norm, though most of them were able to fight it due to their strict up bringing. This had always been a problem in Esset for some reason. The best of the best were disproportionately bent; Herr Himmler himself had often admonished them for this, with reason and intelligent facts, but damn those boys! Probably a testosterone related issue….Chieko glared at the blonde woman for distracting her from her outrage. “You can sit there in that stolen body---yes, I know the whole story---and play the moral superior to me? Life must produce life. There is no other law. Your own kind couldn’t even blow their damned noses with out creating life.” She blew her own noisily and took more tissues to while her eyes with.  
Traugott’s mouth twitched as she hid a smile.  
“Oh, yes, I know what you are, Miss Thing,” Chieko accused. “Contract be damned; you give me back that sperm!”  
Traugott stifled a laugh. “I’m afraid that really isn’t my line, Doctor Sarazawa. You’re going to have to convince him yourself. My hands are tied, by blood oath. I am honor bound to destroy any creature other than him, bearing his DNA. Now if you will excuse me, I do have work to do,” she said gently as possible, standing to pick up the stack of files again. She waited for Chieko to leave.  
Chieko frowned, grabbed three more tissues and left the office. That Brat!  
There was always blackmail.

@ @ @

The afternoon was getting along in the hotel suite and still there was a sense of time running too slow.  
“Yuuji, take Fujimiya and see if you can find Farfarello,” Brad said when the remains of a late lunch were cleared up.  
Yuuji looked at him sardonically. “And how are we supposed to do that?” he asked. “Loan me your telepath.”  
Schuldig’s mouth opened to protest being treated like a thing, but Brad shut it by saying “No. He’s not stable right now, and the last thing you need is for him to lock up with Farfarello. You’d have three nut jobs on your hands.”  
“You mean two,” Yuuji corrected, catching that.  
Brad smiled a little, an evil mirth in his eyes. “Did I say three? My bad.”  
Yuuji gave him the stink eye and crossed his arms. “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me where we might find him?”  
Brad took off his glasses and rubbed his right eye with the same hand. He looked tired. He was tired. “I can try,” he said. “But it might not be worth the effort. Everyone just shut up for a moment,” he closed his eyes, then opened them and focused his talent. The fact that he held on with tight knuckles to the back of a chair showed how much trouble this was causing. He finally came to a conclusion. “Try, and I’m not saying it will work, he’s skipping around like a stone on a lake, try the Japan Red Cross, on the south side of the building, there’s a food cart there, next to a little children’s park, or what used to be. Wait for a few hours at the most.”  
“Lovely,” Yuuji said, unholstering his gun and checking his clip. “Any thing we might have to watch out for?” He tucked the gun back into his concealed holster.  
“Who knows. Just be careful,” Brad’s eyes swept him and for a moment there was an old expression there, then it was gone as Brad looked away in concern at Schuldig. The telepath was damping down a face cloth to fold and lay down with it over his eyes.

TBC


	7. Chapter 7

Crushing Butterflies 7  
Tot read out the locations from the borrowed note book, along with the approximate starting date and ending dates for the vortices.  Nagi was marking them on a textured plastic sheet clipped over the map in a tiny but precise text.     
Brad sat at the end of a sofa, with Schuldig’s head resting on his thigh, the physical contact shutting out the world for the stressed out telepath.   He did not want a repeat of the accidental suicide the idiot had pulled the first time they had come here.  The second time they came to Shinjuku, it had cost them five years, but he had had the free time to monitor his lover’s mental attitude more closely.  This time he had to work and keep an eye on Schuldig, whose increasing bad temper indicated his stress levels.  So he kept one ear on Nagi’s progress and a hand on Schuldig’s chest, just over his heart where he could feel it beating reasonably steady.     
“Why can’t you be this nice to  me all the time?” came the complaint in that endearing nasal voice.  (Brad had realized a few, give or take five, years ago that that particular selection of traits in that rare combination attracted him to a man.  Good looks, and not just a good voice, but a way of vocalizing that caressed the ear and promised a lively intelligent mind behind that mouth.)  He looked down at him; well the cooling washcloth, nose, lips and chin.  He smiled, and tweaked the nose lightly.  “Because it would be boring.”  
“I hate being treated like an invalid,” Schuldig complained.      
“And well you should,” Brad informed him.  “You’re a perfectly healthy Esset agent, in top physical condition, and look at you, laying about like a teenaged girl on her period.  Would you like a box of chocolates and some ice-cream?” he teased.  “A copy of ‘Twilight’, perhaps?”  
“A gun, to shoot you in the foot,” Schuldig grouched.  “What is it with this place that it has to be so much more annoying to my poor head?  And now that I think about it, you can feed me ice cream a little bite at a time, I would like that very much.”  
“Good question,” Nagi said from over the card table.  “While your and Brad’s talents are affected, the rest of us appear to feel no change at all.  You would think my talent would be affected, we share the same enhanced blood flow to the same area of the brain, but nothing.”  
“Not a thing?” Brad asked.     
Nagi looked up, thinking.  He tried the coffee table, lifting it a good foot off the floor and set it down.  “Nothing.  No extra effort, no impediment.  Virus’ talent is glandular, we should ask him if anything has changed.”  
“Tot can draw a blood sample,” she offered.  “To be compared with his levels when we are outside the anomaly again.”  
“I can tell you right now what gland you can stick a needle in….” Schuldig started, but Brad pinched his nose shut until he had to shut up to breath, and batted at him.     
“Enough,” Brad warned, letting him have his nose back.  “Just focus on the vortices, Nagi,” he looked over at the youth. “This might actually lead to something like a time machine, and we want to put a stop to that.”  
“Something like,” Schuldig said.  “You mean, a way to generate a vortex---but how would you time it or what ever?”  
“I thought you were against weird science,” Nagi said, playing with his pen.  This involved spinning it in his fingers like a baton, then let it continue rotating in the air while performing an ellipse, catching it and doing it again.  He tended to do it while thinking now, and it should have been disconcerting, but it was ‘just Nagi’, and he had done it since high school.  “I suppppooossse there might be a way to combine a selected area to the program, but then, you might as well try hooking up a tornado to an app.” He grabbed his pen and shrugged it off.  “Ludacris, just like those morons who were saying the Jews were controlling the weather.”       
“I am going to take all my clothes off and start screaming,” Schuldig droned.  “It seems like a much saner proposition at this point.”  
“Maybe not the screaming,” Brad smiled down at him.     
Schuldig took off the wash cloth and looked up at him, a slow smile of interest spreading.     
Nagi winced, triggered by the tell tale behavior. “GAY!” he stated and pointed to the notebook Tot still held.  “Read.”  
She smiled at him ruefully  and found the next location to chart.     
Schuldig swung up off the sofa to his feet.  “Maybe just a little screaming?”  
“NO,” Nagi stated.    
Brad chuckled, standing up as well.  “Quietly, into a pillow.”  
Nagi put his hands over his ears.  “Lalalalalalaaa!”    
Tot burst into laughter.     
@     @     @    
The little neighborhood park near the old Red Cross building had probably once been quite sweet.  Now the bouncy animals were slumped on their springs, peeled and rusting.  The swing set had, from the shreds of old blue tarp and duct tape, been used as a homeless tent at one point.  It now rested in pieces in a corner, broken and providing a trellis for vines that were not carnivorous.  One hoped.     
A couple of rolling food stalls vended to the passing people.  Udon, which smelt pretty appetizing as the grill roasted meat to go on top of the noodles, and a ‘real Italian ice’ cart, from which Aya had bought one of those long single stick popsicles.     
Aya should never be allowed to eat popsicles in public, Yuuji decided, having stuck to a shaved ice in a dish.  “Stop it,” he finally protested.    
Aya looked at him in confusion.     
Yuuji eyed the fruit flavored ice in Aya’s hand and then gave him a look.     
Aya hid a smirk behind a pout and stuck the popsicle back in his mouth as far as it would go, slurping it out again and licking his lips with just the tip of his tongue, slowly, thoroughly--obscenely--sexy.  Then he dove the treat back in again, closing his eyes in pleasure.     
“Damn it, Aya,” Yuuji turned away from him on the splintery old bench, and stuffed another plastic spoon of ‘Blue Hawaii` flavor drizzled snow ball in his mouth.  It was too sticky with syrup to just jam down the front of his pants, though he did give the idea some momentary thought.     
“It’s always about sex with you,” Aya said primly to his back, running his tongue up the side of the popsicle to catch a sticky drip.  “One of these days, you’re going to get in trouble.”  
Yuuji caught the teasing undertone in that deep voiced stern comment.  “Tch!” he noised in derision.  Like how much more trouble could he be in?  What was that m/m manga cliché, ‘it’s not rape, it’s surprise sex’?  Obviously those things were a danger to impressionable minds and he really should have a word with Aya’s sister about letting her brother at that collection of hers.     
“Oi,” a voice said, startling them both.  “What you lot doing here?”  
For some reason, Yuuji felt a flash of shame at being caught—well, thinking.  
Farfarello blinked down at them with one golden hued eye.  He was dressed little different from the last time they had seen him, though the leather pants were a bit scuffed up and he had a different black t-shirt with some dramatic katakana stating ‘Iseten Summer Monster Sale’ and Godzilla printed on it.  Godzilla was wearing yellow board shorts with blue stripes on them and holding an umbrella drink in one clawed hand, an Iseten shopping bag in the other.       
“Looking for you,” Yuuji said calmly as possible, hoping he wouldn’t have to break up a knife fight.  “Det. Kabane has been going nuts trying to—um—“ uh-oh, wrong choice of words.  “Sort out this covert ops team thing.  Crawford wants to see you.”    
“I’ll get me lunch first,” Farfarello stated in a perfectly sane tone that brooked no argument.     
Yuuji sighed.  Well, he had his ice to eat.     
“You ought to do something about him,” Farfarello said flatly, looking past Yuuji at Aya.  Then he went to order his food at the Udon cart.     
Yuuji swung back around to look at Aya, who grinned at him and held up the bare stick horizontally for him to read.     
It said “This is your lucky day”, with a prize number on it.     
Yuuji rolled his eyes.     
@     @     @     
Nagi slapped the pen down.  “That’s it?”  
“Tot can go through the whole thing again, but that is it,” she said.    
“That’s quite a lot,” Nagi looked over the map.  “I guess he got bored with it.”  Mephisto struck him as being one of those people who could do anything and were still left unfulfilled at the end of the day.  There was a weird restlessness in the man’s strange eyes.  His delight at anything new and interesting was almost as bad as Schuldig finding a new victim to torment.  That whole thing with Fujimiya’s rib and the guy from the sewer…was just very weird.  Out of curiosity, Nagi had tried to casually get Traugott to talk about Mephisto, but she just clamed up and found something more for him to do in her never ending quest to tidy up Esset’s relentless paperwork.     
But here were over forty vortices timed as accurately as possible for the most part, the beginnings often not known by any more than day, plus the potential ones they had from the witch.  And one was about to occur in less than half an hour from now, he checked his phone.  “Totto, get your umbrella.  I want to check something out,” he decided.  
She glanced at one of the suite’s bedroom doors.  “Should we?” her pretty face was set in a moue of concern.    
Nagi bristled internally.  “It’s just a reconnaissance. I don’t need upper echelon approval for that any more than I need it for going to the corner store for a soda.  Or a beer.” Damn it, he wasn’t a child any more, despite how they acted like he was when they weren’t looking at him.  And damn it, he had fallen into that mindset so easily again, Brad having the final say on everything, including trying it on his morning coffee!     
Tot looked slightly arch, but went to pick up her parasol anyway.     
He frowned at her.  Women.     
@     @     @     
“Shit!” Brad sat up in alarm, looking around the room.  
“Jus’ bad dream,” Schuldig mumbled, hugging his pillow.     
“No, it is not,” Brad shoved a stray leg off his and got up, reaching for his clothing.  “Damn it, where are my shorts?”    
Schuldig sat up, pushing his hair out of his face.  “I think you---there,” he pointed to where a pair of black boxer-briefs were laying on the dresser.  “What is it?”  
“Nagi’s made a bad judgment call,” Brad grabbed up the underwear and sat down to pull them on.  
Schuldig’s brain finally clicked back into working mode. “Really?” he got off of the bed.  “We have to go rescue the kid?  Who is now what, a year younger than me?  And took Tot with him, because I do not hear that crazy in the building.”  
Brad stopped and looked at him.  Granted he had been thinking ‘kid’, but yeah, “Shut up and put your clothes on.”     
“I am all sticky,” Schuldig got out of the bed.  
“You’ve got one minute to shower.  And NO you can’t do your hair!” Brad was still rushing to get his clothes on.     
Schuldig physically wavered, then ran for it. Still it gave him a giggle that the immaculate fuss pot was forgoing cleaning up himself.  Then he nearly stopped cold, wondering what the hell that scent would attract in this hell hole?    
@      @      @  
Nagi barred Tot’s progress with an arm.  He looked at her and held a finger over his lips.     
They were at the first of the black ops team’s exits, and one had just come through and was looking around.  Nagi checked his watch.  The timing was correct.  Good.  They seemed to keep mainly to the vortices in the park, but whether this had anything to do with the majority of the phenomenon forming in the park, or by choice of cover, Nagi could not yet guess.  
Tot tapped his arm, and he looked at her to see her mouth ‘Can we kill them?’ at him.    
He shook his head and tapped under one of his eyes.  ‘We watch,’ he mouthed.     
She frowned in candy sparkle pink frustration, hand tightening on her parasol.     
Nagi wondered if it was just his warped upbringing that made him a little thrilled to have a fiancé as whack-happy about killing as Schuldig.  The psychology behind that was just--Eugh.  He focused on his plans.  
The foreign team made their way, all five of them, out of the vortex, alert to their surroundings, yet not seeing the two figures behind the bushes. Nagi had quickly held the branches closer around Tot and himself with his talent to cover them better while leaving them a clear view.     
He checked his watch again.  They had at least three hours before the team either came back to use this vortex or went through another one.  He motioned to Tot to follow and walked cautiously toward the shimmering disturbance in the air.     
@     @     @     
Brad strode out of the hotel entrance just as Yuuji and Aya showed up with Farfarello in tow.  The first thing that struck him was that this was shit timing, and the second thing was that the young Irishman was no longer so scrawny looking.  His shoulders had broadened a bit, his muscles filled in.  His face matured.  “Farfarello,” he said pleasantly only due to training, hiding his frustration at this distraction.  “Just in time.”  
The Irishman sniffed and looked at him a bit oddly.     
Brad frowned.     
“Farfie,” Schuldig grinned.  “This place has done you good.”  
“Aye,” Jei said, still giving Brad a look that said what the Nuns had always said.  Idle hands were the devil’s toys, and Crawford was a man of many sins.  He sorted himself out and gave Schuldig his attention instead.  “You wanted info on the berks trying to blow up the city.”  
“Unfortunately not right now,” Brad said, taking command again.  “Nagi’s gone AWOL and about to get himself and Tot into a mess.”  He hurried across the street toward the park.     
“Oh for….” Yuuji turned to follow him and the others just had to keep up.    
“Come along, Farf,” Schuldig said.  “Let me pick your brains.”  
Farfarello followed the telepath with a ‘here we go again’ look on his face.  
@     @     @  
Chieko finished up her rant and looked at her husband expectantly across the dinner table.     
Sarazawa Ishida had spent the entire diatribe calmly applying himself to his meal, and as she was a rather excellent cook as well as bio-chemist, he usually did enjoy what she prepared, despite her tendency to use meal times to report on every detail of her day.  Still, he was used to receiving in depth reports, and this was not much different from the petty crimes of day to day police work, despite her efforts to build it up to the level of murder first degree with malice afore thought.  Well, he supposed it was, actually, but an abortion before the conception was just putting it too far to the right.  Rather a Catholic idea, and he was no Catholic…”  
“I-shi-da-San,” his wife stated clearly.     
He blinked and swallowed a mouthful of food.  “Aren’t you being a little too rabid about this?” he asked before taking a swallow of beer from his mug.  “A man has a right to say no, just as a woman does.”  
“This is going too damned far,” her left eye twitched.  “And that’s physical; this is my Laboratory he is interfering with.”  
“I mean the right to say no to having children,” he clarified.  “What is for dessert?”  
“Caramel Chocolate Pretzel Gateau,” she stated, “And don’t try to weasel out of this.  The law is the law, he can’t pull a stunt like this just—because he can!” she protested at the insanity of it.  “The brat!” she banged her fist on the table.    
“I’ll take a thin slice,” he said, setting his silver wear down and moving his plate aside.  “That’s a very elaborate sweet.  What holiday is this?”  
“It’s a new recipe,” she growled.  “Ishida-San, I expect you to do something.”  
He looked at her.  “Because as my wife, you can,” he said, with a look in his eyes that was half mocking, half teasing; one that his son had inherited, though Ishida rarely used it himself.     
She scowled at him.     
He held up a finger, “Ah, wrinkles,” he warned.     
Chieko threw her dinner napkin down at the table top and stood up to go get his damned thin slice.  “I want that DNA,” she stated, cutting into the one layer cake on its plate as if it were an autopsy.     
“And what exactly am I supposed to tell him?  ‘Be a good boy and hand it over and this time, don’t get your pet god to destroy it behind everyone’s back’?”  
“Yes,” she slapped the plate down in front of him and stabbed a fork into it.  It fell over, splitting the slice.  
“Ah, you’ve killed it,” he said, examining the devastation.  “No putting this picture up on FoodPorn.com.”     
She put her fists on her hips, glaring down at him.  “I-shi-da-San,” she enunciated again.    
He carefully picked up the fork and teased out an un-crumbled bit of the fancy glazed cake to taste.  “I will have a word with him.  If he comes back,” he decided.  He nodded his approval of the dense and crunchy sweet.  It went well with beer, which was surprising.  
“If he comes back!” she exclaimed.  “Which is exactly why I need that DNA!”  
He had another bite of cake, deliberately counting to twenty to give her time to cool down before saying calmly, “What good exactly is a very short term precognitive when the long term ones all go mad and implode?  The Elders had Crawford mind blocked down to five or ten seconds in advance to keep him sane.  We barely managed to keep them from destroying him outright when he was an infant.  Crawford’s true expertise lays in his ability to skirt through issues and move people like chess pieces, not in five or ten seconds fore knowledge,” he paused to have another sip of beer and looked at her.  “Quite frankly, he is the sort of psychotic, manipulative bastard that makes a good leader, and there will be others.  If he doesn’t want to leave a lot of little Crawfords running around, maybe that’s a good thing.  They’d probably tear the Brotherhood into factions and slaughter each other until one remains like some damned Arab dynasty.” He picked up his beer again.  “It’s bad enough you went and overloaded the Brotherhood with Yuu-chan’s DNA.  Granted, we thought quite logically that he was dead, but still,” he gave her a look that said ‘overboard, much?’.    
Cheiko had sat down with her own slice of cake and now pouted at him.  “Okay, so that project is shelved, but there is something you should know, Dearest.”  
He stopped chewing and frowned, focusing on her.  That tone of voice….  
She kept her eyes on her dessert, pushing it around with her fork.  “Fujimiya-san said Crawford has been using his talent to predict the outcome of days in advance,” she looked up now into her husband’s dark brown eyes.     
He dropped his fork into his plate and sat back, annoyed.     
She put a forkful of cake in her mouth, waiting patiently to see how he would handle that little bit of news.        
“Blackmail the bastard,” Gruppenführer SS Sarazawa Ishida stated.  
@     @     @  
Nagi studied the vortex.  This was it, live, on-line, and three-D, right in front of him.  Absurdly, he had come through the giant city sized version five times with out thinking about it very much at all, but this was on a face-to-face level that rather terrified and excited him at the same time.  Time travel; how had he managed to deal with it before without really ‘dealing’ with it?     
Because he was focused on the physical aspect of getting over the broken rail bridge at the time, he’d had no time to think?  This time, he was standing right in front of it, with nothing to distract him.   Proof the human mind was very, very selective.     
Tot touched his arm.  “Nagi-kun, it makes my tummy feel funny,” she informed him.    
Yeah, it was like being at the front of a mosh pit, when the drummer was going nuts.  There was a humming buzz in the air that was fading now as the thing seemed to be settling in.  Dangerously, it was losing the static-like aspect that made it easy to see.  Now it was almost clear and getting more so.   If you didn’t know it was there….  
Impulsively, he put his hand in and watched it disappear up to his wrist.    
“Nagi!” Tot protested in a much more womanly voice than normal.     
He drew his hand back and looked at it.  It had not mirror reversed like some old Twilight Zone episode, thank goodness, but that had not occurred to him either, mainly because everyone so far had come through okay.  He frowned a little, thinking.  “Tot, hold out your umbrella.  I’m going to peek in, but just in case, keep your handle held tight, and I’ll hold onto the end, okay?”    
She looked up at him, worried.     
He didn’t like seeing that look on her face.  He did not see it very often and he did not like it.  He bent to plant a very light, still shy, kiss on her lips, and hoped that he remembered to wipe the glitter off before Schuldig or someone saw it and teased him, but he never wiped his mouth in front of her.  “Just hold on tight, I’m just stepping in to take a look around and check the time.”  
She relented with a sigh.  “Tot will hold on tight,” she asserted.  
Nagi wondered if she was ever going to give up the child-like persona, but then shrugged it off again and grasped the end of the rather dangerous weapon disguised as a frilly parasol.     
Then he watched his foot disappear as he stepped through the vortex.     
Alice in Wonderland, he thought.  No, through the looking glass.  He looked around.  It was very nearly the same as the side he had left, the umbrella’s handle end gone in mid air behind him.  He could feel the resistance of Tot handing onto the curved handle.  “Can you hear me?” he asked.     
No answer.  Hmm.     
He stood and listened.  There were huge bright flowers near by where on the other side there had not been; he would have remembered them. they were fresh blood red hibiscus with bright yellow streaks, very pretty, but they had little beady bug-like eyes on the edges of each petal like the shell of a clam. The only reason he saw them was because the little tiny pupils followed him as he moved his free hand to brush his hair out of his eyes.  A flying insect of some kind landed on one and the flower immediately closed on it.  He lifted a stick from the forest floor with his talent and waved it at another blossom.  It shrunk back warily.  “Creepy,” he said, letting the stick fall.     
He felt a sharp tug on the umbrella and stepped back through to see the biggest damned hamster he had ever seen in his life.  It bared its teeth, chittering at Tot angrily, and she swung her umbrella around to aim at it now that Nagi had let go.  
Nagi put up a barrier between them and it, but it looked freaking rabid, slamming at his barrier.  
“Nagi-kun, we have to kill it!” Tot said in dismay.    
He almost said let it tire itself out, but then he heard more crashing in the bushes, and more of the things showed up.  They were surrounded.  
“Better idea,” he said and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her back through the vortex.     
TBC    


	8. Eight

The fact that Nagi had gone off on his own agenda and potentially ruined his was driving Brad nuts. How the hell was he supposed to run a team where members thought they could just wonder off with out orders? This jungle setting, an overgrown park really, the contradiction of it, made him sweatingly uncomfortable. Knowing that there were things in it that should have no apatite for humans only added to that discomfort.  
As Brad was glaring at the vortex in consternation, Yuuji looked at the non-lethal watch on his other wrist. “We’ve got two and a half hours before the enemy team comes out of the next vortex—but—where do they get in?” Hazel green eyes sought Brad’s.   
Brad turned to Farfarello, indicating the vortex with a finger. “When does this one come from?” he barely managed not to snap at the berserker.   
Jei looked back at him in clear exasperation. “How the bloody hell should I know? I just got here, and this is a new one I’ve not seen before.”  
Brad felt Schuldig squeeze his upper arm. /Chill,/ the German advised firmly over their mental link. /You’re getting spread too thin, your shield is a sieve./  
He was tightrope walking on his own nerves. His talent couldn’t ‘see’ through the vortex, and he had always been over protective of Nagi. Finding a powerful talent like that battered little kid left for dead by normals had been a warning not to get too full of himself with his five to ten seconds and his gun. He needed that talent intact, and to behave.   
“Nagi and the girl have been here,” Jei said, sniffing the air. “Along with a couple of megahamsters. Look at the ground,” he pointed down, squatting with his elbows on his thighs to take a better look for himself. “Looks to be at least three of them.”  
Well, that was a load of unnecessary information. They wouldn’t be here if Brad had not ‘seen’ those two go through the vortex! But he had not seen why they did so. He’d just felt very strongly that they were heading for more trouble than they were avoiding. Being a precognitive in post quake Shinjuku was like having a sinus infection and going snorkeling.   
There were animal prints the paw size of medium dogs, but definitely not dogly, all around the vortex. Under the animal prints on one side, still identifiably visible, were human shoe prints; one set of them with very square high heels digging in, giving Tot away, Brad noted with disapproval. Why couldn’t that girl dress sanely?  
“They went through on this side,” Jei stated, standing up again. “It makes a difference if you go through one side or the other. Why didn’t he just shoot the hams?” he wondered.  
“Mega-hamsters, oookaaaay. Aya, you can use the sword,” Yuuji stated the last bluntly.  
“No worries. They’re long gone,” Farfarello indicated where the animal prints led off into the bushes. “A lot of the Shinjuku animals avoid the time gates. Don’t like the buzz.”   
“Brad?” Schuldig said aloud, looking at him again, his worried face demanding some semblance of control in this mess.   
“Fujimiya, step through there and tell us what you see,” Brad ordered, and was irritated to see Yuuji look at the swordsman worriedly.   
Fujimiya nodded coolly and stepped toward the side Farfarello had indicated.   
“Wait a minute,” Yuuji said, catching Fujimiya’s arm. “Maybe we should consider all the options before….”  
“Bugger that,” Farfarello said, and stepped through the vortex.   
“Well,” Schuldig said with light sarcasm. “I suppose that’s that.”   
Brad put his hands to his head in an attempt to smother his rage. “If we survive this, we are never coming back here, I don’t care if the whole world is going to be blown up by idiots!” He took a few deep, forcibly slow breaths, then let go of his head to straighten his suit jacket and tie. He pushed up his glasses and was about to make a grim decision when Jei stepped out of the vortex again.   
“How long was I gone, then?” he asked, no sign of guilt involved.   
“A minute or so,” Yuuji answered, subtly stepping between the Irishman and Brad’s quick aim. “Any luck?”  
“Searched a little more than an hour. I couldn’t find them, trail ‘as stone cold. It’s fair Year Nine through there. Maybe the tail end of Eight. The gates go in waves like that, a bunch through to one year, or a month, then all of a sudden, it shifts again.”  
“Damn it!” Brad exploded in anger. “Nagi knows better!” He might be 21 now, but same as at 15, he still behaved like a willful 10 year old at the worst of times.   
“You think he knows better,” Schuldig said, catching him by the wrist of the hand holding the gun, pushing it down to aim at the dirt. “I don’t know if you have noticed, but he’s been getting sort of obsessed with the damned things.”   
Brad scowled at him through the wings of his messed up hair, then put his gun back in the holster under his arm and shoved his hair back. “Damn it!” he swore again, ready to just walk away from this whole mess and let the world deal.

@ @ @

Nagi looked around carefully, not just the bushes and trees, but the ground and sky as well. This place was too dangerous to trust even an ant trail not to be some sort of deadly mutation.   
Tot lowered her parasol. “It’s just the same on this side,” her eyes focused on the bushes around them, wary of predators.  
“Maybe,” Nagi said, “Don’t let your guard down. Let’s find out what year this is.” He was tempted to put up a shield around them just in case, but that would tire him in the long run, and his reaction time was excellent.   
Then again, so was the reaction time of some of the Shinjuku mutants. He half frowned, then put up a shield. Better tired with a headache than dead.  
If Brad was right, and Det. Kabane was a refugee from an earlier time who had come through a vortex, then could they possibly end up in the future as well? The pterodactyls didn’t exactly escape a zoo… Nagi stopped in his tracks. Or had they?   
Maybe the beasts had come from the future.  
Suddenly Schuldig’s idea about how to deal with everything sounded much saner, if still visually disturbing.   
Nagi shook his head to clear it of that mental image. No, one thing at a time. They would determine what year this particular vortex initiated from, and go back and deal with the killer hamsters afterward. 

@ @ @ 

Brad looked at his watch. They were loosing time.  
“That lot that have been popping in an’ out,” Farfarello said. “Y’er after them.”  
“Yes,” Brad said curtly. “I don’t suppose you would care to report your findings. Our intel is that they plan to use the time gates to go back in time in the outside world to change things, then destroy Shinjuku so no one else can do the same.”  
“Kind’a spotted them for arseholes,” Farfarello said in disapproval. “Left one of their own to rot in the old library. Weren’t nothin’ more than a thorn puncture. They’ve got a shot for it, t’hospital. Otherwise, you sort of swell up and pop out seed pods,” he added as a grim after thought. “But they do have a shot for it,” he brightened up again.  
“Home. Now,” Schuldig half pleaded quietly.   
Brad threw him a side long look of warning, then focused on Farfarello again. “Any sign of them packing explosives?” Maybe if he knew what they were armed with they might be easier to locate.  
“Haven’t caught up with them close enough to see much, yet,” the Irishman confessed. “They’ve no idea what they’re messin’ with. Just going in and out willy-nilly. But from what I’ve heard last, it’s not more than two and a half days for them. I did hear something about ‘before the disaster’, what ever that means. Seemed like they was referin’ to something Outside.”  
“Brad,” Yuuji interrupted. “You ‘saw’ them come through the time gates five times. But what if we catch them at an earlier one, before the fifth. Does it really matter what time we catch them at?”   
“Is there any reason why we shouldn’t?” Schuldig asked, glancing at Brad between nervously scanning the bushes and trees around them.   
“I left the one at the hospital,” Farfarello offered. “But you’ll have to go through a time vortex to get there.”   
Brad’s chin went up. Messing with time vortexes inside a time anomaly? “Not with Nagi on the other side of that thing.”   
“We’ve lost five years on the outside last time we came in,” Schuldig told Farfarello. “The world’s—changed. Nagi’s five years older than you last saw him. Tot, too,” he added.  
“We’re not leaving Nagi in there,” Brad said decisively. “We’ll go through this vortex and get him back first. The black ops team can wait.”  
Schuldig looked at the eerily wavering, near invisible gate hanging there. “I really don’t like this.”  
Brad caught him by the back of his short green jacket's collar and shoved him through. 

@ @ @

Nagi sighed and looked around, perplexed as to what to do now. It was just a month into Year Nine. At this point, Shinjuku looked like any other Japanese city after a major quake. Even if the quake had been years ago, the damage had been so extensive, the region was still under reconstruction, though on a less epically disastrous level. Warning signs, scaffolding, major repairs in progress; by now the city had recovered enough to start seriously rebuilding. Life went on.  
The big stores had brought salvaged goods outside on rolling racks and sun shaded tables, all well guarded against theft, but business went on. Tot opened a packet of mocha flavored Pocky and stuck one in her plump sparkly pale pink lips. At least they would not starve, Nagi mused, momentarily very distracted.   
“My, what pretty children,” a man in an expensively flashy suit brought him back to reality, grinning at them standing there on the sidewalk.   
Nagi rolled his eyes. Five feet eleven, damn it, at least a few inches taller than this guy. And that would teach them to wonder around this particular surviving part of the high end shopping district. Nothing stopped the pimps and panderers, not even a major disaster.  
“Looking for work, are we?” the man persisted in addressing them.   
Year Nine, before the big clean up had gotten rid of most of the genetic ‘upgrade’ gangs. The gang he and Schuldig had destroyed in Year 12 was probably at its full strength.  
“Nope,” Nagi said, wondering if this guy had anything folded away under his jacket, like maybe a few pairs of big hairy bug legs.   
The man reached out a hand to grab for Tot’s bare white arm. “Let the little lady speak for herself. What do you say, Sugarplum? Ditch junior here and make some big bucks, a pretty doll like you.” He leered up and down at her outrageous fashion choice.   
Before Nagi could parse this affront, Tot bit off her Pocky and let the end tumble to the sidewalk with a tiny dry little clatter.   
Looking the man straight in the eyes, she grabbed his arm at the wrist, then spun so that she had his arm behind her back. She locked her elbow down on his arm, linked her other hand’s fingers in his, and with a sharp bow, flung him half over her back into the building wall behind them face first. As he crumpled to hands and knees on the sidewalk in sudden agony from a blood gushing broken nose, Tot hauled off and kicked him right in the balls from behind.   
His scream echoed in the skyscraper canyon. A confused pterodactyl squawked back and took off from a tower roof.  
Nagi winced in momentarily misplaced sympathy; but there you go, he thought. Risk them that way, you’re going to get hurt. He caught Tot’s parasol mid shaft before she could aim the barrel point at the guy’s head. She looked at him sharply, puzzled.   
“Not until he is done suffering,” Nagi said calmly. “Wallet.”  
Tot checked the guy’s jacket, then with a sharp kick to the ribs with one of those chunky heels made him curl up over on his side. She found a wallet in his back pocket and handed it over to Nagi, who went through it. No ID. Who would have guessed.   
Taking the cash, he dropped the wallet next to the guy’s whimpering head. He tucked the cash in Tot’s fluffy toy kitten handbag. People passing by expertly averted their eyes, not wanting to be dragged into this apparently normal incident for this area.  
“Please--don’t kill me,” the man begged. “Anything—anything…”  
Nagi leaned down to speak to him quietly. “Learn a lesson. Never, ever touch a lady without her permission.” He stomped down on the guy’s hand, breaking some fingers from the sound of it. The guy could only manage a whimper of pain now, pants wet, eyes streaming.   
Nagi flicked his hair back out of his eyes and offered Tot his arm. “Lets go back now and see what time it is.”  
She smiled at him, her cheeks flushed prettily under the sparkly white face powder with the effort of defending herself, but looking at Nagi for all the world as if he were her hero. He blushed and looked at the sidewalk.   
Nagi could almost hear that awful German’s mental voice teasing him. ‘Nagi-chan’s in lurrrve’.   
“21, damn it,” he muttered under his breath. 

@ @ @

Five steps from the vortex, Brad and the others froze to the sound of quiet footsteps coming their way. Then Brad relaxed a little and holstered his gun. Schuldig was pissed off at him for the dirty trick he’d just pulled, but what else was new. “And where the hell have you been?” Brad demanded of Nagi as he and Tot came around a clump of bushes.   
Nagi blinked at how ballistic this came out. “When did you guys come through?”   
“Just now, and you’re going to explain what you are doing running around here when you should be in the hotel,” Brad insisted.   
“We’d better go back now,” Nagi said. “You can yell later, where you wont draw any other predators.”   
Brad scowled, thinking of so many ways to make him regret his behavior, then stalked back and through the vortex.   
It was pitch dark.   
When they had left this side, it had been only mid-afternoon.   
“Shit,” Brad stated, looking back at the vortex. Rather than seeing through to the daylight they had just left, it only reflected the night on this side.   
“Yeah,” Nagi said grimly.   
Brad looked around. “Where did Farfarello go?”   
“There,” Yuuji pointed to a white piece of paper placed on the trail under a rock as obvious as could be. He went to pick it up, and read aloud. “’Bored silly waiting, you’re on your own’. That lunatic,” he crumpled the paper and tossed it down.   
Nagi was consulting his watch and the Antikythera program on the phone. “But why did time take such a major jump?”  
“Farfie was only in there for a few minutes looking for you, and said it seemed like an hour,” Schuldig told him. “He also said they change randomly.”   
Nagi frowned, focused on the unseen distance for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers. “The spin,” he stated.   
Brad narrowed his eyes, considering shooting him anyway. Just a flesh wound across the butt cheeks, to get his point across. “We’re doing this the old fashioned way,” he stated to the team. “Setting a trap and letting them walk into it. No more dicking around with witches and extemporal anomalies, or any more of this supernatural bullshit!” he ended in a snarl.   
There was an answering growl from nearby bushes, lower in tonal range, more guttural, and not happy.   
“Um—kitty?” Schuldig said faintly.   
A roar shattered the night jungle, causing everyone to group back to back, guns and Aya’s sword out and ready.   
“Big kitty,” Yuuji said in an almost squeak. 

TBC

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

  
“Back through the gate—the other side this time,” Brad ordered sharply. A quick check of the timeline showed him still alive in ten seconds if he did this, and if he had to second guess himself all the time in this hell hole, he would go with that. He just hoped he was right.  
It was a somewhat muddled but effective retreat, with the creature’s wuffling and investigation of their scents all too close to head height for comfort, and Fujimiya (ready to take on what ever it was) having to be yanked through last by the back of his jacket. Not that Brad had any issues with that; either the younger man’s ‘luck’ would hold out, or Fujimiya would be cat food and the rest of them would survive, no problem.   
After the minutes of darkness on the one side of the time gate, their eyes took a moment or two to adjust to the bright light of day again on what Brad hoped was the side near enough to the correct timeline. The whole thing was very disconcerting, even without the beast.  
“Big kitty,” Schuldig stated again, looking around a bit wild eyed. “I never signed up to get eaten by a giant lion-thing or what ever that was.”   
Nagi was focused on his phone first, the one with the Antikythera app in it. “We need to find out what day it is.” He looked around. “It ‘looks’ the same as when Tot and I came through the other side earlier. Maybe the sun was a little higher then, but what the hell time is it? Is it even the same day or year?”   
“No time,” Brad said, walking around the gateway warily, hoping he was ‘seeing’ this correctly. “Now we go back.”  
“But we just…” Schuldig protested.   
“Now,” Brad gave him the ‘you’re asking for a beating’ look. “Close order, march,” he snapped at them.   
This time—it was still daylight on the other side.   
“This blows all my fucking data,” Nagi groaned.   
“It means you have to allow for both sides of the gateway,” Brad informed him. “And that nothing about this place is remotely useful to anyone outside the anomaly. Only a mad man would play with these things, and Farfarello can have them.”  
“Oi, yer back, then,” said madman was back again himself. “Was just goin’ to leave you a note,” he had a familiar sheet of notebook paper in his hand.  
“We’ve changed time,” Schuldig exclaimed catching Brad’s arm in a panicked move, a habit Brad was getting very annoyed by. “Isn’t that a big no-no?”   
“I do wish you would spend less time watching TV and more time cleaning your gun,” Brad told him. “I change the course of events all the time.”  
“But not past events,” Nagi reminded him.   
Brad turned his glare on Nagi. “You are grounded.”  
“Grounded?!” Nagi’s mouth dropped open for a moment. “I’m 21, remember?” he raised his voice in protest.  
“Fine. You can call it ‘under house arrest, pending disciplinary action’.” Brad shoved his hair back and turned on his heels to get the hell out of this gods damned ‘park’. “If we ever get out of here in the correct time, I may just ground you for life!”  
Schuldig took a moment to stick his tongue out at Nagi, then hurried after his irate leader.   
“Oh for…” Nagi grabbed Tot’s hand and followed them.   
Yuuji rolled his eyes and shared a sardonic look with Aya, whose returning glare blamed him for everything.   
Farfarello sighed and followed the lot of them. “Lunatics” he muttered under his breath. 

@ @ @

“Come in,” Greifeldt was at his desk, in the middle of a video chat with his nephew and niece-in-law when Dr. Sarazawa knocked. “I’ll just be a moment more,” he indicated a chair.  
She sat down, a look on her face that warned him he was in for some bad news, along with the wave of dissatisfaction she practically steam shoveled in front of her.   
He looked again at Elena Martz on the monitor, who was in a hospital bed, cuddling the brand new twins in their soft yellow bundling blankets. His idiot nephew had not been able to wait to inform everyone in the family, showing off via vid-chat. The poor woman had done her best to tidy herself up, despite sixteen hours of labor and maybe three of sleep. The babies looked like little pink animatronic gnomes, their squinty, florid faces and toothless yawns pretty much adding to the image. Their mother looked like she’d been through a bout of the Flu and barely survived.   
Greifeldt kept a suitably encouraging smile pasted on his face and said, “Tell that idiot nephew of mine he is under orders to let you get some rest, Elena. (Knowing full well that Martz would hear him, being the camera-man.) I will see you both in person at the naming ceremony. Good bye.” He signed out of the chat with a sigh of relief. “I really don’t see the attraction of newborn---,” he suddenly realized who he was talking to and switched gears immediately as she came to a rapid boil. “Well, Frau Doctor, how may I help you this fine morning?”  
“Drop the cheese, Fredrich,” she stated. “I have information that the council will have to deal with.”  
He did not like the sound of this. He had been hoping it was something minor, like a shipment of test tubes gone missing, or a particularly heinous student prank. He steepled his fingers together on his desk top and prepared to listen to a rant. “Go on,” he said.   
“Being a mother,” she stated with emphasis, “I naturally wanted to know what sort of mess my Yuu-chan had gotten himself into recruiting this Fujimiya boy. In interrogating Fujimiya, I found out that Crawford has been using his talents to see days into the future for some time now. I suspect Schuldig.”   
Greifeldt almost laughed out loud. “Everyone suspects Schuldig,” he said with a slight chuckle, but she interrupted him.   
“Empath or not, stop trying to lighten the damned mood,” she warned. “It means a number of things the council needs to know,” she started counting off on her fingers. “That the brainwashing the Elders put on Crawford to curtail his talent has been broken, and he is in danger of burning out. That Schuldig’s talent is enough to undo what the Elders were able to do with out causing the damage they had to have built in, and that makes him even more powerful than we first assumed. That Schuldig is capable of sending out a wave of telepathic destruction that can fry minds in a precisely targeted strike. And that he is now dangerously dependent on Crawford for his sanity.   
“Worse of all,” she threw her hands up. “Crawford has stuck some sort of deal with the Kami that any use of his DNA is to be stopped! All the required samples have been destroyed, and as you well know, he’s not about to do it on his own,” she finished with an annoyed look. “Dollars to donuts, you can throw Schuldig in with that problem, they’re inseparable. Anyway his DNA is worthless, you saw what a mess Leisl was. I would have to spend the next 20 years teasing out that genetic Gordian knot, and I haven’t got time for that sort of project.”   
He drew a deep breath slowly. Quite a load of concerning information.   
The one problem with handling the higher talents had always been getting them to behave like decent members of society; specifically the Reich’s society. “He did seem to be holding an ace or two up his sleeve the past few times I have spoken with him,” he said cautiously. “Not being a genetic specialist, what is it you would like to suggest that the council do, Frau Doctor?” He did hope it wasn’t shoot everyone and start over again. Or that she had gone mad. He made sure he remembered where the panic button was under the edge of his desk.   
“Make him break the deal with the Kami,” she insisted. “Tell Traugott to stop this nonsense immediately and put that DNA back. Or leave it alone when I get my hands on it again!”  
“I really don’t think anything can be done about Frau Traugott’s agreements with anyone,” he said regretfully, fully aware She was probably listening in on this conversation. He really hated that he couldn’t gage the creature’s emotional levels at all; it made him very nervous when he thought about potentially crossing her, even over so little as the cafeteria lunch menu…. “She does take her job here very seriously, and the organization has greatly benefited from her oversight.” Heaven only knew what they would have suffered if the old kooks had installed their demon. He still wondered if the planned ritual had had anything to do with the sudden catastrophic dislocation of the tectonic plates in that region.   
“Then I will have to force Crawford to break that contract,” Chieko stated. “If he doesn’t toss up some viable sperm and leave it alone, I will inform the entire brotherhood of his bloodline.”  
Greifeldt sensed her increased emotional turmoil, his own blood running cold. This was no threat with her, it was a statement of fact. “You can't do this, Chieko,” he said very seriously, putting a warning tone to his words. “I've already had a discussion with him regarding the suppression of his real identity, and he was not happy, to say the least.” He tried to think of a way to get her to see the other side of this. “What the Elders did to him personally, setting aside everything they did when they subsumed Esset after the war—just knowing that has dumped a major burden on his psyche. I asked him, Chieko-san, I asked him,” he assured her, “if killing them had been revenge enough. His answer was that he did not know. Are you really capable of throwing that all in his face, just to get on with your project? You’re potentially destroying the most brilliant work anyone in the Brotherhood has done to date, baring the Bell.”  
She frowned. It was high praise and a very good warning.   
Greifeldt sighed heavily, and a thought struck him. “Talk to your son. If anyone can get around Crawford’s stubborn selfishness, he can.” Not that he had ever liked the fact that those two were—an item. As an empath, homosexuality left a creepy discomfort on his talent when he was around more than one of them. Himmler was right; they had a tendency to think first only of themselves and their passions. At least normal men knew they had to make sacrifices. But perhaps that was why the homosexuals, at least those of the Brotherhood, were also the most competitive warriors.   
“But Crawford is immune to Yuu-chan. He’s almost completely immune to the entire influence based talent population,” Chieko said with some irritation. “If only we could isolate why.”   
“What ever you do,” Greifeldt had a sudden horrific thought, “do not combine Crawford’s DNA with Schuler’s. I don’t even want to think what might result from that.”  
At this remark, the woman looked incredibly, blandly innocent, the wave of almost purple concealment coming off her countering that impression. “Impossible,” she said mildly. “I would never think of such a thing. It goes against all principles. We only use male and female material in the proper 50/50 combinations—are you out of your mind?” her tone went up just a touch tightly, and she finished with a bit of a high pitched laugh, a teeth baring grin and a wave of her hand. “We are working with Nature, not against it. That would just be insane. After all, we want them to breed true, not be a bunch of inbred mules with all sorts of defects. Ridiculous,” she pulled at the collar of her blouse, her cheeks flushing a little. “Menopause,” she stated. “What an unnecessary bit of hell, eh?”  
He went stone faced on her. Oh, dear. Well that explained that. Given the timing, it had to have been at the Elder’s orders. That last generation of A level talent was all messed up. “Never mind the council, Frau Doctor,” he said dryly, letting her know that they were back on formal time. “That is my decision for now. You talk to Agent Virus and see if he can’t wheedle Crawford into some sense on the matter.”   
She gave him a suspicious look and stood up. “Fine. But when it doesn’t work, I’ll be back, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” she used his title with a bit of acid.   
When the door closed, he tapped the button on the intercom. “Frau Traugott?” he said hesitantly, the cleared his suddenly rather dry throat.  
“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” her voice came with that undertone of amusement it always did, making him feel as if she knew, just knew, he was up to something. Damn the wom—er—creature.   
“This agreement you have with Crawford regarding his DNA. Just how specific is it? Any way around it? For the good of the organization?”  
He heard a sigh through the intercom. “Herr Greifeldt, I can hardly discus such a private matter with you, even though you are the duly elected head of the organization and Herr Crawford has taken a subordinate position to your office. It is, as you know, along the lines of patient information, lawyer confidentiality, and dare I remind you; ecclesiastic sanctity.” At the last statement, her voice took on the strange multiple voices that sent shivers down a mere mortal’s spine, and so obviously on purpose.   
He frowned again. “No need to go overboard, Fraulein.”  
“Yes, I know, but sometimes you monkeys do need to be spanked,” she purred with a slight giggle in her host body’s normal voice. “Would you like your tea now, Herr Reichsfuhrer?” 

@ @ @

The five remaining American and Isreali team were gathered in the old train station’s office space. The building, like others on the worst hit side of the city had for the first few post quake years, been left to the gangs and mutants. Eventually they had been cleared out, but like many others, the station was left for ruin. After all, the cross Tokyo trains no longer ran on this line; plus, the anomaly prevented any repairs from being made, constantly shaking things loose again.   
The door and windows had been reinforced with some effort by the previous occupants, obviously long gone, and the room was defensible. The team had settled on it as their base for now.  
Nerit Tzon paced the floor. Salamon Frankel stood against a wall, watching her with a frown when he wasn’t watching the Americans. Their team leader gone, they were not sure how to deal with the Americans. The mission was still the same. But Jenkins and Alvarez were starting to question Brandower’s decisions. He was their sci-op, the bomb expert, and had been given a rank putting him in control of their side of the team, but the two men were getting irritated with running in circles. Just about the same way Tzon and Frankel were. They had gone back to the ruined library to find Leverson’s body gone, and signs that it had been removed by someone or something. The Americans contended that this meant someone was aware of their presence.   
“He was dead,” Tzon repeated. “There was nothing he could have told anyone. This place is—” she grew more frustrated. "Who knows why someone would take a body. They left his kit. Doesn’t that prove it was—god knows what it was—but they only took his body,” she felt a wave of disgust. The things they had seen here in the past few days, human shaped foot prints or no, who the hell knew what the rest of it was like. “It might have been one of the mutants still hiding in these ruined parts of the city.”  
“You mean someone found themselves a free lunch,” Jenkins drawled.   
“She has a point,” Brandower stated. “Anyone in authority would have looked for ID, taken his pack. There aren’t a lot of non-Japanese here in this time pocket who aren’t well known by the population, and it’s obvious none of us are natives here. We need to stick to the mission,” he said doggedly. “Find a way to go back in time, and destroy the anomaly. That is all we need to worry about until phase two.”  
“If we can ever get out of here in the past,” Tzon said, her nerves showing in her snappish tone. “Every time we go through one of those little anomalies, we end up within three years of when we went through. And yet there are fucking Pterodactyls flying around! Huge eagles, dire wolves, anacondas the length of buses, and all these other things…” she spread her arms in dismay. “Alive and in this time, what ever fucking time we are in now! Proof the anomalies go back to prehistoric times. Why can’t we find one of those portals?” she demanded.   
“Yeah, I was wondering,” Jenkins interjected. “How does that fit in with your government’s attitude about the whole Jewish thing anyway?”  
“Jenkins,” Brandower said warningly.   
“I’m just curious, man,” he spread his hands in innocence. “Evolution or Creation? Or what? I’m the last one to be gettin’ racial here, but them bones flyin’ around out there are not fake, ya know?”   
“It could be the anomalies that let those things in have been closed,” Frankel offered. “We’ve already seen one time gate shut down right before our eyes. Look, Brandower’s right, our mission is to get out into the earliest possible time and blow this place to hell, then get on with correcting the mess those bastard Nazi’s made of the future. Not to play mad scientist and figure out what’s up what with the dinosaurs.”  
“I’m talking the key to the gates to the past!” Tzon insisted. “We need to find at least one gate that will let us out far enough back, and for some reason, we keep getting shunted in circles.” She sat down in one of the remaining un-broken office chairs and rested an elbow on a dust covered desk, shoving her braid back over her shoulder in exhausted dismay.   
“I got an idea,” Alvarez said belligerently. “Why the hell don’t we find out who’s in charge of this hell hole and interrogate them? This is enemy territory, why are we pussy-footing around like we’re afraid of them? We need to just march in and kick some slant ass and get some answers.”   
“Because it’s not enemy territory,” Brandower raised his voice in anger, intending to remind the aggressive soldier who was in control here. “Japan is, or was, a U.S. ally. We need those military bases intact to deal with the Chinese and Russians. If we succeed, the balance will be restored.”  
“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Alvarez insisted. “Right now, they are not our ally, and what ever we do here, we need to do it before things can be right again. We’ve wasted three damned days playing stupid games with these damned time gates. Find someone in charge and make them tell us what we want.”  
“Makes sense,” Tzon admitted, though reluctantly. Changing this from a covert to an all out pin point attack might not be a good idea, but they had to get on with it. Who knew how much time had passed outside. The had read the news papers available, the news of the outside world presented as the past. History had over run the time they had entered the city. It was as if their goal had been moved even further out of their reach. 

@ @ @

Det. Kabane sat down at his desk and frowned. There was a file on the pile that had not been there when he went off to lunch. The manila paper was slight scuffed at the edges from having been in the drawer. A cold case with new evidence? No, it was red stamped ‘closed’. So…why was it here?  
He picked it up and flipped it open. There was a photo; non-Japanese guy, maybe Arabic. Under that, his name was listed as Leverson, Machau; his age, and a military rank in the Israeli secret service. “Executed for attempted terrorism against the City,” he read aloud, puzzled. Then he picked up the phone. “Kabane here. Get me the foreigner, Crawford. No, don’t arrest him, get him on the phone if you can’t get him to come here. Tell him I have some new information for him.” He looked at the photo in the file, then the date.   
Well, relatively new. 

@ @ @ 

Brad had barely set foot on the sidewalk out of the weird atmosphere of the so-called ‘park’ (which seemed to have its own separate weather pattern) when a car marked with the Shinjuku police logo pulled up to the kerb. The police cars here were an eclectic mix of models because of the anomaly’s restrictions. This one was a two door Nissan, driven by a young man in a suit with a penchant for bleaching his black hair blond and wearing it cut in a high buzz. Brad wondered what now, but his talent had nothing to show him for it, which was alarming, but he kept it off his face.   
“Crawford-san,” the man said, bowing politely with a smile thankfully not affected by a set of fangs. “Det. Kabane would like to see you, if you have time. If not, will you please call him as soon as possible?”  
“Not under arrest, then,” Yuuji smirked at him sideways.   
Brad checked his watch.   
‘’Best go,” Farfarello said. “It’s bound to be something about the buggers.”  
Brad gave him a ‘who the hell is in charge here’ warning look, but the Irishman ignored it, tapped two fingers to his temple in a sketched salute and headed back into the park.   
Suddenly Brad’s talent kicked in, like, oh, by the way, afterthought, it’s the file. ‘What file’ he muttered internally, the vision a blur, and then his talent was off again with the weather, traffic, a snatch of his stock portfolio, and damned little of use to him currently. He hated this place.   
“Small car,” Schuldig pointed out.   
“The rest of you go back to the hotel and wait for orders,” Brad glared at Nagi specifically.   
“Shotgun,” Yuuji made to go around to the passenger side.   
“I said ‘the rest of you’,” Brad insisted.   
Yuuji held his hands up in surrender, being dagger eyed by Brad and death rayed by Aya was enough to curtail anyone’s plans. He stepped back onto the sidewalk and sulked just a tiny bit as Brad took the passenger seat up front after Schuldig had jammed himself in the back seat. He leaned on the hood to look across the plain cloths cop at Brad. “Call if you need bail.”  
“Oh, do shut up,” Brad said irritably, focusing on the windshield’s view as the car started forward. He was acutely aware that being stuck in the back seat, Schuldig was verging on panic, his talent running him on data overload. He was twitching like a meth addict back there. /Settle down,/ he thought at the red head. /Just focus on my mind and see if you can figure out why my talent is going A.D.D. with out driving me nuts with your unnecessary comments./ Giving him a task might help. “Tell me, Detective, does your office have any telepaths or precognitives on the payroll?”  
“One ‘finder’, but she’s nutty as a fruit roll,” the officer said, focused on his driving. “Needs a handler to interpret what she’s seeing. Everything comes out as bad poetry, like those old Greek sibyls. Without context, no translation. Technically, we can’t arrest people for thinking they are going to kill someone.”   
“Ah,” Brad said, and decided his curiosity was cleared. “Lucky me,” he smiled wolfishly as his mood lightened. Still, if their only ‘talent’ was nuts, that would be something to back up his report.   
“Usually we just warn the victim and let them handle it. Sometimes that leads to murder anyway, though,” the officer turned the car smoothly into the police station parking lot. 

@ @ @

Schuldig was fighting the crazy. Everything in his body was reacting to the fight or flight going haywire until they were in the lobby and he could catch Brad by the arm and force himself to calm down when the cacophony in his mind had stopped.   
It wasn’t just the noise, it was the feelings. Outside this insane city, he only picked up the sound of passing minds; but in here, he got everything full blast. Every. Freaking. Little. Thing. Physical, emotional, and thoughts. And inside the police station, it was a real dose of lunacy; from the drug addict pissing himself in the booking room, to the guy who had strangled his wife over the dinner table after hallucinating she was some sort of monster trying to kill him with some meat roll she had found the recipe for online. The cold sweat from the man’s return to sanity rolled down Schuldig’s armpits and he was disgusted with it; considering this was a linen shirt and it would be hell to get out. If he weren’t surrounded by police, he would shoot the bastard for that alone. Instead he gave the horrified man in cuffs a vicious leer of schadenfreude as they passed by. The newly widowed man startled violently, thinking he was hallucinating again at the sight of this red maned oni.   
Brad patted his hand to get Schuldig to ease up on the death grip, /Wrinkling the suit,/ came the acerbic tones that were more like a caress to anyone used to the hateful bastard.  
Schuldig took a deep breath and calmed himself as best he could, his mind snuggling closer to the static white out of his partner’s talent. He remembered the order, and pulled himself together a bit more, to have a look at what he was seeing in there. There was something off about the normal flow of talent under laying Brad’s conscious mind. It skipped and started then stopped as he ‘listened’ to it. He looked at Brad with his eyes, alarmed.   
Brad shook his head slightly to indicate he was not to react openly.   
/This is worse than last time,/ Schuldig told him.   
/I know, which is why I want you to keep an eye on it./  
/I should tell you, then, that my talent is picking up more than thoughts. I’m being affected by emotions and tactile feelings, despite my blocking. It’s as if everyone passing by, I am inside their heads so deep, against my will, a kaleidoscope of mind shards in my head. I think this is what cost me my child hood memories./ he frowned.   
/Perhaps we should see Dr. Mephisto before we leave,/ was Brad’s thought, and Schuldig felt remorse at the thought becoming a decision. He did not like the pretty doctor. Not one bit. And he was not a liability, once they were out of here, he would prove that.   
/Shush,/ Brad soothed, and it was like a kiss on the cheek. Schuldig felt calmer now, thankful for the understanding this jerk often faked for him.   
Honey brown eyes looked sidelong at him with a ‘what the fuck’ attached to the look, then a smirk on those lips. 

@ @ @

Kabane was smoking again, and stubbed out the cheroot with annoyance as Crawford and the sketchy telepath darkened the office door. “This popped up this morning,” he picked up and dropped the file for emphasis. “One Machau Leverson, MOSSAD spy and assassin. Executed Shinjuku Year 13, for plotting terrorist acts against the City.” His one eye glared at the file as if it had done it on purpose, then looked up at the foreigners.   
Crawford stepped over to pick up the file and page through it, studying the photographs of the man, front, sides and back. “He confessed?” he looked at Kabane.  
“Obviously,” Kabane drawled sardonically. Japanese criminal law insisted on a confession and sincere apology. The apology had not come. The sword had.   
“You have no memory of this?” the telepath asked, looking over Crawford’s shoulder with those creepy blue, curious eyes.   
Kabane shot him an irritated look. “It’s coming back in fits and starts. Given that it was years ago, it’s—annoying.”  
“Would you be alright with letting my partner have a look into your mind?” Crawford asked carefully.   
Kabane considered this. “Does it hurt?” he asked bluntly.   
Schuldig grinned evilly. “Not if you lay still and try to enjoy it,” he purred. “Then it is just like normal….”  
Crawford elbowed the air out of the joker. “You won’t even notice it if I order him to be discreet.” He gave the man a warning look over his shoulder.   
Kabane wondered how long this comedy act had been at it. “What does it involve, really?”  
“Really, you just think about these new memories, about the case, and I follow the trail deeper into those memories,” the red head said more professionally. “It is like giving a report, facts and photos, except in your mind before you put it on paper. I will not stray from this particular memory set,” he crossed his heart with an evil grin that was one hundred percent insincere.   
“He tends to the dramatic. If he says he won’t pry, he won’t,” Crawford stated.   
Kabane had the distinct impression that words such as ‘or I will wring his neck’ were left unspoken, then realized he had ‘heard’ them. Quickly, he thought about the man Doctor Mephisto’s office had called him to collect, and surprisingly, it went from there, as easily as if he were just on the call.   
In moments, he blinked and that was that. He looked up at the red head quizzically. “That’s it?”  
“I am good, jah?” Schuldig grinned at him again, this time like a little school boy, albeit, one that probably had horns hidden under that bandana.   
“Remind me to give you a biscuit,” Crawford said dryly, then returned to Kabane. “May I have a copy of this?” he indicated the file.   
“Certainly,” Kabane said, still a bit boggled at the way his mind had finally settled down on the matter. He remembered everything now. A routine investigation, here in Shinjuku. Not like the old days when they tossed people behind wooden bars and starved them into writing out their last poem for such offences. That had taken literal footwork and lots and lots of ‘compensation’ for information. And suddenly he realized it was lunch time. 

@ @ @

“Well?” Brad asked outside on the steps. He had told the officer who had brought them to the station that they would walk the three blocks back to the hotel. He needed time to think without the distraction of the others. Normally, Schuldig was distraction itself, but every time he stepped off a curb or avoided a pedestrian, his talent went haywire on him, and it took all he had to remain stoically in the present.   
“Kabane came through a vortex, stepped through in the late 1700’s,” Schuldig stated. “Why did you make me lie?”  
“It’s not lying if you’re under orders. For heaven’s sakes, remember, we’re the bad guys,” Crawford was exasperated.  
“I keep forgetting, as you tend to keep wanting to save the fucking world,” Schuldig grumbled.   
“I keep explaining to you, if the world goes, so do we. Circle of life, remember? Who is going to go fishing for your damned sea food pasta, which you should cut back on, that tummy of yours…”  
“Is all muscle,” Schuldig retorted a little too snippily. “We could train dolphins to round up shrimp. It’s been done with fish, you know.”  
“And clothing?” Brad arched an eyebrow at him.   
“That’s your problem, Mister Hand Tailored Suits. I could run almost naked, like Tarzan,” Schuldig toed a huge palmetto bug out of the pathway. "Eugh, is it that time of year here now? I hate cockroaches,” he shuddered.  
Brad was picturing him in a ‘butt flap’ and then frowned at him. Sure, he would survive in the jungle. “Never mind that, if Kabane came through from that far back, what if these bastards get there as well?” The minute he said it, tapping the file envelope in his other hand, he was confronted with devastation scenarios.  
“Simple,” Schuldig looked at him. “The Shoganate will have them executed for being foreign. It was open season at that time, remember?”  
Brad laughed, his mind settled again. “I love Japan.” 

TBC

 


	10. Chapter 10

  
Farfarello watched the terrorists go through yet another gate, and when they were all gone, sauntered over to pull up the little yellow flag. Why they insisted on leaving the things around was beyond him. There was no writing on the stiff canvas to indicate what time they had left it, or even any co-ordinates. Of course, a GPS device would not work here anyway, which from their complaints was part of their problem. They could mark up a map all they wanted, though. All that would prove was that the gateways had a tendency to move, as they should well know by now if they had done any of their intel work. He found another gate ten meters back from that one, and plunked the metal stick into the ground. It was the one they had come from a day ago, sending them back to Year 15. Basically, he’d been keeping them running in circles, and a damned good call as he now knew, with what they were after.   
He considered the situation, thinking of what he knew and what Crawford had said. That things outside had moved on, changed. And the young man with them had been Nagi, he had smelled that, but it was still quite odd, that the others had not aged, and Nagi had. He wondered what his own age was now, as he had seen no change in the mirrors he had looked into occasionally. It seemed to him that he had been here little more than a few months as things went, but hopping through the gates had been for fun, not science, which he had little use for. He was a berserker, not a doctor, he thought wryly to himself.   
He looked up at the clouds floating in the blue, island sky and listened a moment for the trilling warble of birds, then set about getting after that bar-be-cue he had been planning day before yesterday, when for him, all this shite started. 

@ @ @

Brad, his suit jacket off and tie loosened, was looking over the larger map of Shinjuku as it now stood 18 years after the quake. It was spread over a folding table room service had sent up and he leaned over it on one hand, the other tucked into his back pocket, a stray lock of ink-black hair falling over his forehead.   
Nagi had laid the marked up plastic sheet over this version of the city. While he had found himself breathing less shallowly again after finding out they had got back to the time they had left from, he was still feeling extremely week bowelled over the whole thing. If Tot had not been with him, he might have seriously freaked out. He was still not convinced they would get out in the same time period they had left ‘the real world’ in, but he could tell it would do no good to complain about it to Brad. Near misses never counted with him. (Probably why he treated Fujimiya like a un-scooped dog poop most of the time.)  
Nagi stood with his hands in his slacks front pockets, watching the man think over what he was 'seeing'. Anyone else would label it creepy, the way his eyes would flash from warm cocoa brown to amber, but Nagi had got used to it very early. The first time Brad had looked into his eyes, he’d seen that scary demonic flash and scrambled back in fear, but then the hand reaching out to him had remained steady, the face patient and neutral, and he had realized, not horrified by what those eyes were seeing. A real little nightmare, from the photos in Nagi's file. Brad had not winced in disgust, nor shrunk back as others had; he had simply smiled a little and continued to hold out his hand to the shattered little child cowering in the trash bins of a filthy Tokyo alleyway in the dead hours of the night.   
The five years, Nagi had spent thinking he would never see those eyes, or that hand again had done a number on him, he knew that. Abandonment issues. Psychology and all that weak assed shit aside, he’d done his best to do what Brad would do, think the way Brad would think about things, and it had served him well. Now he wondered how he had ever thought he knew the man well enough to imitate him. Now that Brad was back.   
/Should I be worried, Nagi-kins?/ Schuldig murmured softly into his mind, the accompanying feeling of mild concern and a bit of jealousy let Nagi know this was just plain nosiness, not the usual attacking a chink in his armor to get on his nerves for the fun of it.   
/Don’t be an ass, Schuldig,/ he thought back at him, irritated.  
/Well, I’ll let you hero worship, but don’t touch./ there was a smirk along with that, and the telepath was out.   
Nagi looked over at him, a sofa pillow starting to hover.   
“Nagi, behave,” Brad said without really giving it much thought, his focus still on the map.   
The pillow dropped. Nagi decided he would go back to thinking about the whole time thing. His power made him Esset’s biggest asset next to Brad and Schuldig, but he wanted to do something more than physical. For those five years, he had often felt like an athlete who was valued as nothing more than a racehorse rather than a human being. He wanted to show them his brain was worth more than just ‘floating’ things. Solving the time vortex, or at least finding a way to harness it would be that goal. Even if he couldn’t harness it, to sort it out would be just as good. He wasn’t a scientist per se, but he was damned good at math and problem solving, and really, wasn’t it all just maths?  
“We need to locate the gates that lead to the past beyond the first year,” Brad looked up at Nagi. “What have you got marked in that book for these?”  
Nagi went to pick up the note book he had yet to return to Dr. Mephisto. “Only one mentioned went back to the time before the quake,” he found the page. “It turned up in Year 5 and a lot of people who had survived took it as a way out. Shinjuku passed a law saying no one could be indigent, as it lead to crime, so they also got rid of a lot people who were societal burdens by shoving them through,” he looked at Brad. “That gate closed in Year 7. The pterodactyls showed up in Year 8. They’ve been seen coming out of thin air in some places. That means the gates can be airborne, possibly on both sides, since the flying animals come and go through them. Other than that, there is no note of a gate going back any further than Year 5, leading to the future. There is one thing I noticed, the newer they are, the shorter back they go, and they don’t switch exit years over the time they are open.”  
“Does he mention any other animals that are out of time?” Brad’s eyes flashed again, then he frowned. “Never mind. With all the mutants, it’s hard to tell which are prehistoric and which are just new native species.”  
There was a sort of ping in the ‘mental air’ as Schuldig started up from his apparently boredom. “What about the native species?” he said aloud. “Mephisto’s trophy cabinet, the freaky skulls with horns. He called them Oni, said they ate people—but what are they?”  
“What has that got to do with anything?” Brad asked dully. Obviously he was not getting much of anything from his talent unless he super focused on using it; he was getting as cranky as he had been before Shuu fixed him.   
Schuldig wilted slightly under the criticism, but Nagi saw him man-up almost immediately with an answer. “What time did they come from? Or are they mutants? He would know, wouldn’t he? He collected the skulls.”  
Brad’s lips formed a moue. “Alright, you call him and ask.”  
Nagi smirked as the redheaded jerk automatically chaffed under the result of his big mouth. “I’ll call,” he found himself saying. “I have a lot more questions to ask him anyway.”   
Brad did that freeze in place thing as his eyes flared amber behind his lenses in the artificial light of the room ceiling lamp. “Go in person,” he said, focusing on Schuldig again.” Then he looked at Nagi, who while not a pre-cog, had sense enough to get a bad feeling about this. “Go with him,” Brad said, giving Schuldig the ‘don’t argue’ look when the panic flashed across his pale face.   
Nagi sighed and rolled his eyes, forgetting once again that he was not 16 and then smirking a little as Schuldig shot him an arch look. He picked his uniform jacket up off the back of a chair and gave Tot a kiss on the cheek in passing. “Don’t let him con you into anything weird,” he said quietly.   
She grinned at him. He knew by now she could take care of herself, but he also knew Brad had a way of getting around people to get them to do what he wanted that made Virus’ talent look like the cheap parlor trick it was. 

@ @ @ 

“Why would he send you out alone, knowing how you freak out over all the noise,” Nagi asked casually, outside of the hotel lobby.   
Schuldig frowned. “Sadist. Discipline. He’s up to something. Maybe he thinks I’ll get used to it. He’s forcing himself to use his talent, so I should be forced, too. What ever,” he grumbled.  
“If we were stuck here, would you be able to deal? You’re not going to try and off yourself again, are you?”  
Schuldig stopped walking and turned to look at the fit young Japanese man. Nagi had had the benefit of plastic surgery as a pre-teen, and had matured as strikingly handsome as a J-pop star. It was odd to look at him and see him all grown up with out the intervening years, but he was still Nagi, still asking the dagger-in-the-back questions. “Remember, kiddo, we’re still the grown ups, and you don’t have to check your damned back all the fucking time.”  
“Oooo, I’m so put in my place,” Nagi shot back with an amused but challenging gleam in his blue-black eyes. “I had to check my back for five years, and it’s a good thing it was habit to start with, so yeah, I want an answer. Because if you pull another loony stunt like that, Brad’s going to just fold up and die, and you know it.”  
“I could just murder you now and put you out of your PTSD misery,” Schuldig countered, his temper up for more reasons than he cared to examine himself.   
“Bring it, you red headed fuck monkey,” Nagi said, his hands in his pockets clenching, shoulders set, eyes wide with crazy threat.   
Schuldig glared at him, then guffawed. “Oh, ouch, that’s a good one! You have put your big boy pants on, haven’t you?”  
“I had a bad influence growing up,” Nagi said and turned to start walking again, “So what about the Oni skulls?”  
Schuldig kept pace with him easily, his legs still being the longer set. They were walking slow as the Mephisto hospital was just up the street and neither one of them were in a hurry to step into that nightmare. “I don’t know. Oni are supposed to be mythological Japanese beings. So where did the skulls come from? And for that matter where did Mephisto come from? Through the gates or did the quake just toss them up? We all saw what happened to the Valkyrie. She just moved in on that girl like an attic space flat mate and that was that,” he tapped his head. “Mephisto claims he woke up with no memory, crawled out from under the rubble, and he’s the same thing as that Nurse creature. Kami.”  
“The alignment, the quake, the anomaly, the gates,” Nagi counted off on his fingers. “So like a volcano, the gates are smokers, venting off the time stresses. You’re thinking maybe the whole thing brought the Kami from the deep past, when they were supposedly more powerful?”  
“I think they’re aliens,” Schuldig stated, looking now up at the tall twin towers of the ex-Tokyo Municipal Building and current Hospital. “That whole thing about the spear and the curdling of the islands is just the volcanos being explained by a natural mind, but the history goes too damned far back for the 700’s. ‘Something like a reed forming in the shallows’ and then suddenly there’s life all over the land? And the bit about the different gods for landforms and plants. Maybe animals, too, but the Buddhists were there at the time, and animals can be kami on their own. Sounds more like evolution to me, and I think the islanders somehow passed that real science down from their limited point of view.”  
“Too. Much. TV,” Nagi leaned forward at him a bit and poked him in the chest to make his point.   
Schuldig frowned slightly at him. “Alright, Mini-me, you copy-cat Brad all you want, but that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.”   
“Monty Python jar,” Nagi admonished, and moved to push open the hospital doors. 

@ @ @

Yuuji had been at the other end of the table, arms crossed, watching Crawford now that it was 50% safer to do so. Aya had been bored with all the plotting and science, just like when they were in the basement of the Koneko no Sume Ie during a mission brief, and was now sitting in an arm chair with his paperback German grammar. Yuuji rather regretted his increasing fluency, but with out the excuse to switch to French, couldn’t slip up and say some things to Brad he would regret. In other words, flirting was right out.   
He sighed a little, “Surely you can think of something for me to do. I want this over with and to get out of here as much as Shuu does. None of you have an ‘eat me’ sign on your back for the local Law.”   
Brad straitened up and looked at him.   
Yuuji felt his lips twitch into a knowing smile as those eyes narrowed archly at him, then tried to fend it off. Who needed a telepath? Baggage, oh baggage. Storage lockers full of double entendres and they both had a copy of the keys. He shook his head. “Seriously, what can Aya and I do? Hit the streets and keep our eyes out for anything?”  
“No,” Brad said. “Not until I’m certain it’s going to lead anywhere but into trouble. We have three hours of daylight, and our quarry only seem to move at night. They no longer have an injured companion to gather supplies for, and they might have enough food stocked for a few days. Their goal is to get out in the past. That means sticking to the gates, if they don’t realize they could just as easily step out of the city at any time.”  
“Why send Schuldig out there on his own, when you know he can barely cope with the data overload?” Yuuji asked. He knew there had to be a reason to take such a chance, but as always, someone had to shake it out of the guy before he would admit it to himself. On the surface, Brad could be callous and mercenary, but deep down underneath, you might scratch ‘human’ every now and then, and that had been his job growing up. He still thought maybe something Brad had done had lead to this whole anomaly thing, but he knew he could never prove it. A one man conspiracy, that was Brad in a nutshell.   
“He’s too strung up, I needed time to think with out alarming him. It occurred to me that if we screw up, three things might happen,” Brad said, looking out the wall of window at the city. “Shinjuku might implode, and that will be the end of it. The opposite might happen; the anomaly swallow the whole planet, disperse, and all this would be the new normal,” he indicated the view. “Or, they might trigger the anomaly to further seal itself down, lock up, and we might be trapped here for the rest of our lives, in which case, something is going to have to be done, even if it means some sort of lobotomy.” He frowned. “Until they actually set the damned bombs or what ever they plan to use, I can’t see that timeline,” he met Yuuji’s eyes again. “All three possibilities are real at this time.”  
Yuuji felt a cold chill up his spine. “You’ve seen this?” he said quietly.   
Brad did not indicate either yes or no. “I think I could use a cup of coffee. We’ll wait for Schuldig and Nagi to get back with anything they can shake out of Mephisto. There are a number of missing puzzle pieces, and I need more information to chose the right timeline.”  
Yuuji drew in a deep breath and let it out slow. “Any chance the status quo might remain just that? They fail and everything remains the same?”  
Brad looked serious. “Honestly at this point, no.”

@ @ @

Schuldig stepped through the tall double doors leading into what had been the Tokyo mayor’s office of the municipal building, and was now the ‘lair’ of Dr. Mephisto. There was still a human sized ‘bird cage’ hanging thankfully empty there behind the huge desk. The artsy tumble of archeological artifacts now buried even further in climbing and flowering plants, and the weird massive contraption consisting of four giant glass tubes obscured by liquid and mists with various hoses attached that seemed to go up to the two story high ceiling and into the ducting system were still there. Schuldig had a feeling that someone had been attempting clones at one point, as they were tall enough to contain a full grown human being, just like the cage…  
“Welcome, gentlemen,” Mephisto said, having stood up from his seat at behind the desk. There were two comfortable looking chairs placed in front of the desk, and he indicated them with a smooth white hand that anyone would think had never seen work; fine white marble carved by a master and brought to life. That was the main impression of Mephisto, a mythical creature stepped from a block print, precisely lined and beautiful beyond human reach. “Please, sit. Coffee?”  
“Yes, thank you,” Nagi took the chair on the right.   
Schuldig sat down. While he could not read Brad’s mind when the man did not let him, there was still a sense of a living mind there, warm and functioning. This one was completely blank, like Nurse and her variations. Like an animated corpse. He managed to suppress a creeped out shudder.   
Mephisto sat down again and pressed the intercom on his wrist band. “Nurse, coffee for three, please.”  
There was a brief “Right away, Shyachou,” then silence.   
She was as good as her word, the door opening and a rolling cart being pushed in by one of the nurses in a white pant suit uniform not more than a minute later. “Chief sent the files you requested as well, Shyachou,” she laid the folders on the desk, then bowed and removed her non-existent seeming self in an efficient bustle to get back to work. Schuldig nearly jumped out of his skin as Nagi reached over to lay a hand on his arm and give him a concerned look.  
Schuldig snapped his arm away, pissed off that the little wart (well, big wart, now) was going soft on him, and in public, too. He sobered up and addressed the gorgeous boogey man, who he was annoyed to see was gazing at him with a gently tolerant smile. He hated hospitals, doctors, and yes, nurses. It wasn’t right that there were people who knew their way around his insides the way he knew their minds. “We have questions, Herr Doctor,” he growled.  
“By all means, ask them,” Mephisto responded.   
Nagi placed the note book, now clear of post-its, on the desk with both hands. “Thank you, Sensei for the loan of your notes.”  
“The Oni,” Schuldig tried to maintain control of this ‘investigation’. “Did you call them that because they resemble the mythological creature, or because they were actually Oni.”  
“To all intents and physical characteristics, they were Oni. The digestive tract was that of a pure carnivore…”  
“Please, no medical speak,” Schuldig waved a hand in front of his face, “Yes’ or no.”  
“Yes,” Mephisto said, smiling sardonically, and poured the coffee, answering both sides of the questions at once.   
Schuldig frowned. He knew that sort of smile. Indulging the dimwits. Brad had an architype. He accepted his cup and saucer and helped himself to the cream and sugar.   
Nagi took his black, swallowed, and his eyes rolled up in to his head a moment in bliss. Schuldig gave him the ‘moron’ look, then sipped his.   
Oh.   
He remembered in that moment the rumor that somehow the Doctor managed to lay hands on some of the best coffee in the world in payment for some miracle cure. It was no mere rumor.   
“What have the Oni got do to with your attempts to catch the would be terrorists?” Mephisto brought him back to Earth, sipping his own cup.   
Schuldig made the mistake of raising his to meet those eyes, and felt stomach turning vertigo before he managed to switch his focus to a white draped shoulder. Mephisto’s eyes were black, with a sheen of gold, and depths that seemed to show far galaxies. Unlike Frau Traugott, he had no reason to wear a pair of deceptive glasses to disguise his alien-ness. “Did they come through a time gate? Or with the quake?”  
Mephisto paused a moment in thought. “They must have come through after the quake, when the smell of decomposing bodies in the rubble was at its worst. The anomalies were more numerous then, moving faster, more apt to catch the unwary. It’s quite possible a good many otherworldly things came through at that time. The Oni did serve a useful purpose; however, once they had exhausted the available food supply, they started to prey on the weakened living. There, I drew the line.” He set his cup down on its saucer.   
“You didn’t mention that in your notes, the frequency and speed of the vortices that far back,” Nagi said, “So we are trying to understand.” He ignored the irritated look Schuldig threw at him.  
“It was a study based on current conditions,” Mephisto said precisely and laid a hand on the notebook and drew it to himself across the large desk, his fingertips resting on it gracefully. “And I had no accurate records of the previous years.”  
Schuldig wondered what the deal was with the higher the rank, the bigger the desk. Or did he use it to do autopsies on? “And the Pterodactyls? Not to mention people like Kabane, who is obviously a relic from well before the demon quake.”  
Mephisto looked at him again. “There is nothing stopping you from presenting your theory in plain language,” his tone was mildly teasing.   
Schuldig had been getting more and more defensive as he was floundering in deep waters he felt he was not equipped to swim. “We’re trying to isolate how far back the time gates go. These people want to change history.”  
“For the past two years, there have been no reports of any of them going back beyond five years after the quake,” Mephisto answered. “And we are no longer getting ‘tourists’ from the future. It is my guess that as Shinjuku becomes more stable, the vortices are slowing down in frequency and span. We are no longer troubled with magical attacks, or ‘evil magicians’ wishing to make the city their private kingdom. The incidents of spontaneous infectious mutation have been curtailed, thanks to Mr. Crawford decision to bring the Shinjou girl here. Frankly, there is little chance of these terrorists actually achieving their desired result using the vortices,” he settled back in his chair.   
So that was why he was so stand-offish about getting involved, despite his vaunted protection of the city, Schuldig realized. It was a wild goose chase to him. “They might still find a way to blow the dome of the anomaly to blazes, if their goal is to stop others from attempting to use the city as a time machine.”   
“You might have noticed that the anomaly protects itself,” Mephisto said. “Any serious damage attempted from outside would be reflected back on the outer city—and that would be tragic,” he frowned seriously. “But the only way they would be able to get out in a previous time would be in the same manner as you and your people come and go.”  
“Ah,” Nagi said in comprehension. “They might end up leaving into the future of the outer world, but can go no further back than post quake.” He looked at Schuldig. “We only have to stop them at the Yamanote line crossing.”  
“But they don’t know that.” Schuldig looked in Mephisto’s direction again. “The problem we have is that they are hopping in and out of the time gates. Det. Kabane was correct, there is no way of putting out a bulletin to search the years for them, and we can’t waste days following them back and forth through time,” he sighed.  
“If we can only locate them, we can put a stop to this,” Nagi cut in.  
“This is the frustration of Shinjuku,” Mephisto said seriously, raising his hands palms up a little in a minor gesture of surrender. “We can only continue to do our best to solve the unique problems that arise. However, rest assured that from the capture of one of them in Year 12, both the authorities and my staff have been aware of these people and as they continue to pull raids on the businesses in this town, they are—annoying more than just the public authorities. Sooner or later, they will run into less—thoughtful individuals,” he smiled sardonically.   
Schuldig pulled himself together, forcibly ignoring all the damned noise and pain coming from the surrounding hospital and ordered his thoughts. “Unfortunately, we can’t go home until we find them,” he said firmly. He had no idea how, but they would if they had to tear the whole city up, they would find them. “At least our chances are getting better,” he started to rise from his chair.  
Mephisto shifted to pick up one of the files the nurse had brought in, “One of the reasons I wanted to see you was that I have some news for your Mr. Crawford.” He looked at Schuldig specifically, which set the telepath into defensive mode immediately. “The ‘talent’, one Sylvia Lynn.”  
Schuldig resettled himself, sitting forward now, “What about her?” He felt mixed parts of anger and remorse, his heart starting to pound. He really did not want to know what had happened to her. He focused on all the times she had pissed him off lately and set his anger in place. No, he did not care what happened to her. Brad was his, and had proved it. If she had been gracious about it, he might have said something, but no, she had to pull a vindictive bitch move, and that was that.   
“As expected, her brain showed the same signs of extra blood vessels clustering around expanded neural clusters. However, this area of neural hyper activity was also reinforced by denser cell structures in the surrounding tissue, effectively preventing the vessels from rupturing into the rest of the brain. This is not as evident in either your, or Mr. Crawford’s brains, in the thickness Ms. Lynn evidenced; nor was this physical phenomena found in any of our local ‘adepts’.” He opened the two other files in the thin stack to the pertinent pages. “When compared to the brain scans I performed on yourself and Mr. Crawford, there was only slight hardening of the tissue surrounding the enhanced area.” He looked at Nagi. “I don’t suppose you would mind being scanned before you leave us again?”  
Schuldig looked at Nagi, wondering if this was going to be kosher with Esset.  
“If we have time, I would find it interesting,” Nagi glanced at Schuldig.   
Schuldig wondered, because he knew the difference between Sylvia and Nagi’s talents. Sylvia had been at the lower end of the A levels, because she could only put her telekinesis behind her own physical moves. Nagi had passed so many limit tests, they had stopped before he got too full of himself. “I think that would be something Crawford would find useful,” he said.   
“You may take these copies to him,” Mephisto closed and neatly stacked the files to push them across the desk with both hands. “Now if you don’t mind, gentlemen, I have a hospital to run,” he smiled wryly. “Or a hospital to run me.”

TBC


	11. Chapter 11

  
Kajiwara Yoshitake, pretty much perpetual Mayor (because no one else wanted the job) of the Japanese Independent City State of Shinjuku threw another playing card at the metal mesh trash basket he had set up on the rather bare trophy shelf in his office. He alternated between playing mini-golf, elaborate origami (with ridiculous city council proposals) and card throwing, along with various forms of solitaire until he felt really creative. Then, he would call in his secretary and dictate long pieces of complicated literature in letter form to other heads of state around the world, which would be typed up, signed, and filed away rather than sent.   
Occasionally, when he was just about to lose his mind and declare war on some other city or something just for the change of pace, his wife would pull another one of her stunts and liven things up. He still thought about chaining her up on full moon nights, but Mephisto-sensei had cured her of that lycanthropy last year. It did not, however, make her any less of a silly bitch.   
He threw another card and sighed as it drifted gently into the basket to land on the others. He was getting too good at this. And there was no further to move the basket now. Perhaps he could knock out a wall and enlarge his office?   
He took his feet off his desk, his back cracking from the un-ergonomic position he had been sitting in too long, and was just a centimeter from pushing the button on the intercom when it buzzed at him. “Yes, Noriko-san?” he answered, perversely hoping it was something horrible, like another outbreak of man-eating giant cockroaches.   
“There is a foreign lady here to see you, Sir. A Ms. Martin. She speaks Japanese,” the middle aged office lady announced with her usual formal blandness, though he detected a certain undertone of disapproval. Noriko-san had been his predecessor’s secretary at the time of the demon quake, and while she was getting a little long in the tooth, she kept herself up well. Admittedly, the hiring pool of young 21 year olds had dried up years ago, and Noriko-san was now a ‘fixture’, as well as most importantly, non-threatening to his crazy wife.   
“Did she say what this is about?” he frowned slightly.   
“Apparently she is a reporter, Sir,” Noriko stated. “With an Outside news organization.”  
He slapped his hands together, rubbing them vigorously. Ah, an intellectual challenge. “Send her in. Let’s see what this about.”   
Noriko-san hesitated before answering, “Yes, sir.”  
A moment later, she held the door open, standing to one side, “His honor the mayor will see you now, Ms. Martin.”

* * *

Agent Tzon walked in.   
She was wearing a navy blue skirt suit, a white ruffled blouse a little too tight for her, and a pair of too high heeled red pumps. She had washed her hair and styled it, made up her face, and carried a hand bag over one arm, a note pad and pen in one hand, and did look the part of a ‘foreign’ reporter. The fact that the team had raided all three of the surviving department stores for the largest sizes they could find to fit her was covered by her teeth baring grin. (The shoes were killing her). “Mayor Kajiwara,” she held out her hand to him, walking right up to his desk. “Alice Martin, New York Times. So nice to meet you.”  
He stood and bowed formally, his eyes looking to her hands for a meishi with a slight frown. None was forthcoming. “Ms.—Martin….” He said, sounding not sure of the pronunciation, and continued in English. “To what do I owe this honor?”   
She dropped the grin momentarily. “You speak excellent English, your honor,” she said in Japanese. “I’m here from the New York Times. I’d like to do an in-depth interview on your amazing city. Naturally we couldn’t arrange for an appointment ahead of time, we only just found out how to enter the city.” She looked around pointedly. There was no visitor’s chair with in range of his desk.  
“I assume you have your official papers,” he said with a polite smile, ignoring her body language. “Your visa to be in Japan, your identity and employment papers from your newspaper, and so forth?” he encouraged. “Something showing you were officially permitted to enter Shinjuku?”  
She looked at him, and smiled again. “Why, no, I was in a bit of a rush and left them at the hotel for safe keeping. I’m just so excited to be here.” She was playing the ‘gaijin smash’ game. Just bluster in and be foreign and get away with it because; ‘foreign’.   
“Interesting,” he said. “You speak Japanese quite naturally, yet you don’t expect to follow our laws.”  
“Shinjuku is still part of Tokyo, it didn’t occur to me that I would need them,” she said, as if that explained it. “Mayor Kajiwara, my news paper….”  
He looked her up and down. “You know, my wife has that same outfit. I did not think foreigners would find shopping in our city so—convenient. Especially when we hardly cater to the larger sizes of non-Japanese bodies,” he spoke carefully and smiled.  
Tzon frowned slightly. “If it’s inconvenient, perhaps I can make an appointment to come back tomorrow. I have my camera team with me….”  
“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary. Let’s just take this as it comes,” he pressed the intercom button. “Noriko-san,” he raised his voice just a little. “Tea would be nice.” He stepped around the desk and walked over to the standard Japanese arrangement of two sofas with a coffee table between them. The angle of the set up was such that all could look out at the view of the city, and the faintly rainbow shimmer of sunlight on the anomaly in at this time of the afternoon. “Please, sit.” He indicated the opposite sofa to the one he’d sat down on. He made himself comfortable. “Tell me why your news paper sent such a charming young woman on such a dangerous mission?” He looked genuinely puzzled.  
Tzon sat down, turning her legs to one side to avoid flashing any more than necessary in the tight skirt. She remembered to take out a pen and flip open the top bound note pad. “As you must know, Mayor, the world has been fascinated with the unique situation Shinjuku is in.”  
“What year are you from, Ms. Martin?” he asked before she finished her sentence.   
Noriko-san rolled in the tea cart and began setting out the cups and small plates of traditional sweets.  
“New York,” Tzon said, deliberately miss-hearing him.  
“But what year,” he repeated.   
“Oh, sorry,” she smiled. “2023.” (After all, how was he to know she was lying?)   
“Really? Then your American civil war is over?” he raised a cup to sip from.   
Tzon knew this was year 18 after the quake. They had entered from 2017. “Oh, years ago,” she shrugged it off, crinkling her nose. “But my readers’ interest is in Shinjuku, and how the city has not only survived, but flourished.”  
Noriko bowed formally to them both, and rolled the cart over to one side against the wall. She left the room and shut the door quietly behind her, but not before giving the Mayor a certain look.   
The Mayor sipped his tea again. “I’m curious, Ms. Martin. How do you plan to deliver this story to your readers in 2023.”  
“Well, I assumed that by now, you all know how to get someone back out into their own time.” There it was, she had literally tossed it out, red cape to a bull. “After all, you receive deliveries and mail, and news from the outside world…,” she faded out.  
Kajiwara was shaking his head negatively to her every word. “You might have noticed that the timing of such things has been—a little off?” he said apologetically. “I’m afraid you’ve made a terrible mistake.” 

@ @ @ 

Brad’s eyes snapped open. “The mayor’s office.” It was his turn to lay on a sofa with a damp cloth over his eyes. More like collapse. His head felt like it had already exploded, and the migraine meds he took were not even touching the pain. “Yuuji, go,” he ordered. “Take them alive.”   
“Them who?” Yuuji grabbed his jacket and pulled it on, tugging his pony tail out of the back collar.   
“Woman,” was all Brad said.   
“Where the hell is the mayor’s office?” Yuuji persisted.  
“Old municipal hospital,” Brad whispered, clamping his skull in both hands. “Just kill me before you go.”  
Yuuji made a rude noise and for safety sake, scooped Brad’s shoulder harness off the coffee table where he had left it. “As if. You’ll survive. Tot, don’t let him near his gun. If he tries to kill himself, shoot him in the foot,” he tossed the rig to her.  
Tot caught it and laid the weapon on the map table well to one side. “That might make his head feel better.” She said speculatively.

@ @ @

Aya followed him out. “Do you think it’s possible the anomaly is somehow rejecting Crawford and Schuldig?” he asked tentatively.  
“The anomaly?” Yuuji considered this as they waited for the elevator. “Why would it be so specific? I think it’s just the same old thing. Tension, stress, over working his talent.”  
Aya’s pretty eyes were slightly narrowed on him. “He would send you to capture a woman.”  
Yuuji stepped into the cabin and pressed the button for the ground floor. Aya ducked in as the doors closed. “He doesn’t expect me to seduce her, you jealous nut job,” Yuuji told him. “Might I remind you, Esset trains us to use the talents we have efficiently.”   
Aya smiled evilly and leaned closer to him. “I’ll show you a nut job,” he purred, looking wickedly up at Yuuji from under his eyelashes.  
Yuuji looked at him sharply. “Don’t you dare get me thinking about sex on a mission,” he warned.  
“Too late,” Aya pointed down with a smirk. 

@ @ @ 

One foot inside the door to the suite, Schuldig took in the sight of Brad laid out on the sofa with an arm over his eyes, and scowled. Then he saw the gun holster on the small service kitchenette counter and the worry really kicked in.  
“Migraine,” Nagi diagnosed quietly. It wasn’t exactly a migraine, but that was what they called it when Brad got this bad.   
Schuldig went over to boot the coffee table out of the way and squat beside the sofa. He laid a hand on Brad’s shoulder, the mad house noise in his own mind immediately subsiding, but he was careful not to try to tap into Brad’s mind and catch his pain. “Mein Mann,” he kept his voice very low, just above a whisper. “You were not to over do it,” he admonished.   
“Yuuji-kun was sent to the Mayor’s office,” Tot told Nagi as he looked around questioningly. “Crawford-san saw a woman there and sent he and Aya-kun to get her.”  
“Did they remember the duct tape?” Nagi asked.   
She twisted her lips a bit in a half pout, half frown, a finger to her chin, making a pretense of wracking her sparkly brain. “No….but I don’t think Yuuji-kun needs duct tape,” she made her eyes bigger somehow despite the fancy contacts already enlarging them.   
Nagi arched an eyebrow. This was true, especially with Yuuji and women. “I wonder what she was doing at the Mayor’s office. You can’t exactly kidnap him in the middle of the day in this city.” Shinjuku might have quieted down in recent years, but it was still a battle ground of yakuza, self inflicted mutations, territorial magic users, and just plain free range crazy.   
“It’s an attempt to find a way out into the past,” Brad finally spoke. He took Schuldig’s hand off his shoulder and held it to his chest. “Nagi, water.”  
Nagi grabbed a glass off the counter and filled it from a small bottle from the suite's fridge.   
Brad let go of Schuldig’s hand and half rose on one elbow to take the glass and drink, managing not to dribble more than a drop or two on his shirt and the sofa. He handed it back and dropped down again, done. “Just leave me alone until Yuuji gets back. Maybe if I just pretend I’m not here, it will all go away, or I’ll quietly hemorrhage and die,” he put his arm back over his eyes.   
Schuldig put a hand to his forehead and shut him down. Let Brad get angry when he woke again, but this was getting scary. He gritted his teeth and gently pressed past the barriers Brad seemed to put up automatically, even when unconscious. He checked to make sure there was nothing physically busted, then got out before the code red pain took hold of his mind.   
He stroked back the ink-black hair and sighed.   
The reports the doctor had given them—this place could kill them one way or another. Like radiation and certain pollutants caused cancer, he was certain just being here was going to kill them. 

@ @ @

Yuuji put his splayed fingertips to Aya’s chest, pushing him up against the hallway wall in warning. “Stay out here, just in case,” he said quietly.  
Aya was already in full aggressive mode, his racing glove covered hand on his katana hilt under his long coat. “Just in case what? We go in, grab her and get out, right?”  
Yuuji gave him a stern look. “One, Brad’s talent is screwed up. We don’t know if she is in there, or going to be in there, or has already left. Two, Brad said ‘alive’. That pretty much puts you on the sidelines, watching my back, my little sword happy maniac,” he grabbed the top of Aya’s katana handle and waggled it. “Now behave,” he checked both ends of the hallway, then quickly kissed Aya lightly, if wetly, on the nose.   
“Are you using your talent on me?” Aya glared, rubbing at his nose to dry it.   
Yuuji grinned. “Of course,” he patted him on the shoulder. “Wait for me, Babe,” he winked.   
Aya tried to scowl as the subtle hypnosis worked on his mind, but all he could do was sigh and check out Yuuji’s butt before the door closed on it. Stupid Yuuji.  
Wait—Crawford had said ‘them’. That meant there were more than the one woman in there. Maybe her back-up was out here somewhere? Aya frowned again and got his mind out of Yuuji’s pants to put himself on alert. Though he couldn’t see the point of keeping more than one of them alive for any reason. So, yeah, he could kill the others…. 

@ @ @

Noriko-san looked up at the lanky blond who had walked into the mayor’s outer office/waiting room. Good. Gods. “Can I help you?” her voice embarrassed her by squeaking just a bit.  
Yuuji took off his sunglasses and hooked them in the unbuttoned neck of his polo shirt, glancing around at the room. “This may sound odd, but is there a foreign woman in there with the mayor, or has she left already?”  
Noriko blinked at him. Then a blush rose up her neck and into her cheeks. “There is a young lady in there. A reporter from some Outside newspaper.” Really, she was too old for this sort of thing. “And?” she asked as coolly as she could, sorry she had given him that much information.   
He stepped right up to the front of her desk and leaned over a little to. “She might be trouble for his Honor,” he spoke quietly. “Real bad trouble.” He made the hand gesture for ‘yakuza’. “I’d like to go in there and drag her out in handcuffs,” he took a pair out of his back pocket and dangled them off two fingers. “Preferably unconscious,” he smiled.  
(Not that I’m into that sort of thing, but maybe I wouldn’t mind it myself…) she cleared her throat and put that nonsense aside, though it was difficult. (Really, some men should be outlawed just because.) She gave a little tug at her blouse collar and reached for the intercom button.   
A hand caught hers and very gently set it aside with a little caress. Startled by the intimacy, she looked up again into the prettiest pair of hazel green eyes, and realized he was more Japanese than he had seemed from distance. Those cheekbones, golden skin, that jaw line—and oooh, those eyes….”Um.” She said. He couldn’t be one of the Toyama Clan, it was still broad daylight. Why on earth was she having such a reaction to him?   
He pressed a finger to his lips, then went to stand close to the door to the inner office, listening. He padded back to lean close and speak softly again. “You get out of here, to a safe place in the building, got it? My partner is standing guard outside. Tell him who you are before he does something stupid.”  
He strode back to the inner office door, opened it and stepped in, shutting it behind him. She heard the little click of the bolt lock being set, then hurried to obey. 

@ @ @ 

Nerit Tzon was still parsing the Mayor’s bland explanation with a sinking feeling. There was no way of knowing what year it would be on either side when anyone came and went. Yes, the city had an outside connection by wifi, and ordered and paid online, but when things showed up was when things showed up. Basically, things were just shoved through the anomaly by the military guards outside, and someone was on duty to pick them up.   
“But how does that work?” she was truly puzzled.  
“It works because this is Japan,” Kajiwara stated. “Hello, who are you?” he asked, perturbed.   
Tzon looked up at the man who had just come into the Mayor’s office with out being announced by the secretary.  
“No one much,” Yuuji smiled, looking at the woman. “And who are you?”  
She frowned. There was something about this guy…something on the edge of her memory.   
“What are you doing in here?” the Mayor asked, standing up. “Where is Noriko-san?” he sounded a bit worried now.   
“Safely off to do some shopping or other, I should hope,” Yuuji said, pulling a gun out of his concealed waistband harness. “Stand up slowly, Lady.” He took out the handcuffs again. “Mayor Kajiwara, if you’ll put these on this would-be-terrorist while I keep her covered with this nice, deadly gun, please?”  
Not one to argue, the Mayor caught the cuffs as Yuuji tossed them, but Tzon ducked with the distraction, out of her seat and launching herself at Yuuji from a runner’s starting position.   
Aya was right. The whole ‘alive thing’ really was a pain in the ass.   
Yuuji dropped the gun and bent so she hit him midriff first against his pointed right shoulder, missing her strike for his neck and getting the air knocked out of her. He grabbed her arm with his left hand and chopped down on the nerve center of her upper arm, then swept her feet out from under her. He was aware of the much hyped Israeli version of martial arts, but he had the advantage of longer limbs and testosterone.   
She landed badly, but was up again, fighting (and sounding) like a psychotic with her strike shrieks and yells.  
Yuuji dodged about, taking a few pretty good blows, wrecking furniture and checking her timing and habits. They managed to trash the sparsely furnished office, with the poor mayor dodging them with wide eyes in terror. Finally, Yuuji let her get in close, pretending to be off balanced by a stumble over a chair leg.   
She fell for it. He recovered with a full body spin, and caught her right in the crotch with his raised knee as hard as he could. Most women did not expect that sort of thing, and it made her eyes bulge a bit before she staggered back, the nerves in her upper thighs burning as she fought against them going numb. Her chin set hard.   
It was now totally personal. She was going to kill him.  
It also gave him a distance shot, this time with the toe of his fashionably pointy boot, before she completed a step towards him.  
“Sorry, Lady,” he said in English as she went down on her hands and knees with a whimper, “But I’m a feminist,” he caught her across the temple with the back of his fist and shoved her down the rest of the way to half kneel and put the cuffs on her. “Equal treatment is equal treatment,” he got up to haul her to her feet.   
To his consternation, he saw that the Mayor had turned his back to them and was holding his cell phone up, victory fingers raised, presumably grinning, taking a selfie with his “rescuer” and “attacker” in the background.   
Yuuji rolled his eyes and dragged his captive out of the office.   
Aya was standing there in the hallway with his arms crossed. He looked at the woman Yuuji was pushing out the door with her cuffed hands held painfully high behind her back so she was forced to bend over a bit. “That was quick,” he said blandly.   
“Her back up should be around here somewhere,” Yuuji said. “Tie her legs, will you, she keeps kicking at me.”   
Aya pulled a braided cord out of his jacket pocket and knelt to catch and tie up her ankles. She started swearing at him in some language.   
“Nothing to shut her up with,” Aya said, drawing a dagger out of his boot as he stood. “I could cut her tongue out,” he offered. “The German can still deal with her.”  
She shut up, glaring at him, daring him to try it.   
Aya smiled sweetly, and with a strike like a viper, popped a hole in her left cheek with the razor sharp tip of the knife, just scraping the tops of her molars.   
Her eyes went wide as the blood started to run down her jaw.   
“Aya,” Yuuji protested. “Gods, you’re fucking crazy. Now she’s going to bleed all over me if I carry her!”  
“Tough,” Aya said and turned to stalk back to the elevator. Now, he could find the others if they were hanging about.  
“Tcha!” Yuuji scowled and heaved her up in a fireman’s lift. She started swearing again, but he ignored it. 

@ @ @

“The hell?” Jenkins said, lowering the binoculars. He and the other American were on a department store rooftop opposite the old hospital/now government offices. “Someone’s got Tzon. Right out the front door! Broad daylight.”  
Alvarez looked through his own binoculars, then took out his radio and keyed it. “Base leader, we’ve got a situation. Star is compromised, repeat Star is compromised.”  
After a moment the connection crackled and Brandower’s voice came through. “Re-coup. Out.”   
They did not dare stay on the radio for long, afraid they would somehow be over heard by the locals.   
“We need to get her back,” Jenkins stated, picking up his back pack.   
“The hell we do. You heard. Re-coup,” Alvarez stated. “This was her big idea, she knew the consequences. We’ll find her later. When we know who those guys are and what the hell is going on.”

 


	12. Chapter 12

Nagi opened the suite’s door, dourly studied the situation, then stepped aside to let Yuuji bring the yelling and threatening woman in. “Better dump her in the corner. Brad’s indisposed,” he said ominously. “Schuldig had to shut him down.”  
Yuuji had no problem with lugging her over to a corner by the wall of window and putting her down next to a potted plant. He had jokingly checked when they first arrived; it was fake and non-carnivorous. Too bad. He sidelined his worry about Brad. That, he would deal with later. “Get me something to stop her mouth with,” he ordered over the noise she was making.   
“Next time, take the duct tape,” Nagi said mildly, going over to the coat rack and pulling a roll out of Brad’s trench pocket to toss to him.   
Aya stayed put by the suite’s entry door, scowling.   
Yuuji had not let him go hunting for the other terrorists, figuring his back would need covering as he carried the woman the few blocks from the mayor’s office. Shinjuku was a damned weird place. No one had done anything, except an obvious yakuza who had offered to buy the woman. Yuuji had politely declined, despite the temptation.   
He bent to look the cussing and threatening woman in the face, putting a hand up to prevent her from spitting at him. “Listen lady; you knew the risks you were taking when you signed up. Nagi, shut her damned mouth so I can get this on her.” He pulled out the tape, bit the edge and tore off a piece. There was no avoiding the half inch knife wound in her cheek, but it looked like it had swollen shut. If she lived, it would certainly scar.  
Blinking, Tzon suddenly found herself unable to unlock her jaw, let alone move her lips. Yuuji slapped the tape over her mouth, making sure it was firmly applied, then ran another strip around her head to keep it in place. She glared at him with angrily narrowed eyes, making angry muffled sounds. He laughed curtly. If looks could kill, he would have been murdered two years ago.   
“Now, can we go?” his would be murderer demanded behind him.   
Schuldig came out of the bedroom he and Brad had staked claim on and shut the door behind himself. “Thank gott you shut that bitch up. He needs rest, and I’m not sure we should proceed without him.” He looked stressed and tired himself. Half ovals of dark shadows were beginning to form under his eyes.   
Yuuji did not like that look. Brad had to be really bad, if this class clown was that worried. “We need to catch the rest of these bastards and get out of here, Shuu,” he snapped.   
“You think I would not agree? But if we do anything with out him…” Schuldig’s protest fell flat, his crossed arms wrapped about himself protectively.  
“I’m pulling rank,” Yuuji stated harshly. “There’s your data base,” he pointed to the trussed up woman on the floor. “Find out where and when they are hiding and tell me. Right now.”  
Schuldig looked over at her, then back at Yuuji with reluctance. “We don’t know what will happen. If you go through a gateway…”  
“You’ve been around him too long,” Yuuji informed him, not even bothering to use his talent on the telepath. He knew instinctively he needed to keep Schuldig on his side with honesty, not manipulation. “I will deal with Brad when he’s with us again. You stay here; Aya will go with me and we’ll take Naoe and Tot with us. Nothing will go wrong,” he added firmly, hazel green eyes very serious.   
Schuldig frowned. He looked over at the woman again. “If you have to go through a time gate, I won’t tell you where they are, and you can sit here and wait.”  
“That’s insubordination,” Yuuji warned.   
“You can pull rank all you want, and I will tell you where to shove your little badges,” the red head’s temper rose. “My loyalty is to Brad, not the damned Brotherhood!”  
“Schuldig,” Nagi spoke quietly and reasonably. “We need to get out of here. You’ve laid out your terms. We will abide by them. No time gate crossing,” he put his hand over his heart. “You know I can enforce that.”   
“You’re grounded for not following orders, remember?” Schuldig reminded him.   
“Oh for… and you’re out of your mind with worry about Brad! That’s not helping the mission,” Nagi told him and pointed at the woman. “Get over there and just get the information. If Brad were awake, he would be telling you the same damned thing!”  
“I hate you,” Schuldig stated. He walked over to look down at the trussed up woman.   
Tzon glared up at him, her sarcastic smirk not quite making it behind the tape’s constraint. She thought he would have to take it off, and she would not talk anyway, except to scream bloody murder. She drew in a deep breath to do so.  
Schuldig chuckled, picking up this thinking. /No, you are wrong,/ his voice said in her head, as if through a pair of head phones. A rippling sensation went through her mind, horrible and frightening, playing on her every nerve like some manic epilepsy attack. Had they somehow drugged her, she wondered.

“Oh, this is good,” Schuldig said aloud, grinning. “Little Miss Foul Mouth here was supposed to get close to the ‘future’ president and involve him in a sex scandal. If that did not do it, her buddies were going to assassinate him before the election, come hell or high water. These people never learn to change their tactics. They plan to destroy the anomaly after they have control of the U.S. government, either by forcing Japan to do so, or declaring war.”  
Tzon stared up at the red headed man in shock.   
“No, it was not your pal Leverson spilling the matzos,” Schuldig responded to her only rational supposition. “Do you know he was executed years ago here in Shinjuku for terrorism? No? Ah well, that was just like yesterday,” he slowly paced the floor in front of her. “What is it that mulatto man said? “There are consequences to elections”. That is the democratic way, and if you and your masters in Israel do not like that, tough titties.” He widened his weirdly pretty blue eyes at her mockingly. “Esset has put an end to these imperialistic regime changes. ”After all, we are social democrats,” he grinned.   
/Nazi,/ she spat the word at him in her mind.  
“Yes, of course,” he said casually. “And just as invested in my ‘politically constructed tribe’ as you Jews are in yours.” He waved a hand as if to wipe all that away. “So, now down to business.” Those strange eyes focused on hers.  
She felt the awful sensation in her head again, as if her brain were being fingered through, memories flipped past her conscious like someone flipping television channels with a remote. Her eyes rolled up in her head, it made her dizzy and nauseous, but there was nothing she could do.   
“They’re at the old train station ruins, in this year,” Schuldig glanced over at Yuuji. “Do you want know the funny part about all this?” he bent again to ask her. “The Yamanote line rail is the only safe way out of the city. You were right next to what you were looking for all along.”  
She stared at him. It was—creepy. What the hell was going on here? It was impossible she kept telling herself, but he was—a telepath? Such things only happened in fantasy.   
“You see, my dear Ms. Tzon,” Schuldig confided primly, switching to German. “We are Esset, and you know, all that stuff about constructive breeding, and evil scientific experiments starting back in the 30’s? Here we are!” He grinned again. “Able to read your mind, ruin your future, and crush you with a single thought. And the most fun part?” the smile widened even more, his voice a purr. ”We will be turning you over to the Americans with a full confession. And while the American President has been sympathetic to Israel these past five years, the man does not ignore truths.”   
The too wide Cheshire cat smile dropped away, a peculiar long standing anger quite clear now as he leaned closer, holding up her chin with one hand to look directly into her eyes, speaking very, very quietly and slowly. “Because I will make sure that no matter how you fight it, when you are asked, you will confess. Over and over and over again, in excruciating detail. Other than that, your life will be pathetically normal.” He tapped his head. “I will fix it so that if you try to kill yourself to stop it, you will be frozen in your tracks, paralyzed, trapped in the web of your own guilt, until you give up the attempt. This will continue until you die of old age. Unless one of your own executes you first. Not to worry, we will see to it you are put in a maximum security prison, where they can’t get you.” He straightened up and reached down to lay a mockingly gentle hand on her head.   
She screamed behind the duct tape. No one heard her beyond that room.

@ @ @ 

Shinjuku Station was a surreal wreck. The quake had twisted and warped most of the tracks as the crevasse widened between the City and its surrounding. The rails stood up like some bizarre failure at modern art, reaching for the sky as the island sun began its splendid descent into night. The one track still attaching Shinjuku to the outer world was a suspension bridge of concrete, rail tracks and rebar. Some attempt had been made to reinforce it, but it looked damned scary. Yuuji tried not to think about how much of Naoe’s talent had got them over that rickety thing rather than any remaining structural integrity.   
Having gone round the building in two by twos, they found only the one entrance; the others and windows closed with thick bolted on sheets of metal, or bricked up. Was it to keep something out? Or something in? Yuuji rather wished he dared call and see if Brad had anything to say yet, despite his sharp words to Schuldig.   
“Sarazawa, I have to see them to focus my talent on them,” Nagi reminded him.   
“If there is only one entrance, they can’t escape,” Aya stated, making sure his neoprene grip racing gloves were on tight. “They won’t have a chance.”   
“Blood bath verses bags of blood?” Naoe commented, ignoring an evil snarl from Fujimiya. “Do we want them all dead?” he looked to Yuuji.  
Yuuji considered this. The woman and four men, tied up in the back of the rental SUV, which sat nine in a pinch…Nope, not with the six of them as well. If they had rented a van, but no. Not even bundled up and tied to the roof rack. “Yeah,” he said, thinking of what Schuldig had said. “The woman is enough baggage.”   
“Seriously, I could just walk in and ‘phiisht’,” Nagi closed his held up hand into a fist. “Problem solved.”  
Aya glared at Yuuji. He could almost feel little bits of his DNA fizzling out. “Just let Aya go in,” he said, giving up before he was reduced to dust.   
“Pussy whipped,” Nagi said under his breath as Aya yanked open the door and swiftly stalked into the building.   
Yuuji considered saying something rude, but then again, who knew what the ‘kid’ would do now that he was a full fledged member of Esset and had survived ‘terminals’. Instead he gave Tot a look, then looked back at Naoe, arching an eyebrow; let him interpret it as he liked.   
Score. Naoe looked bent, and just as he was about to open his mouth, Aya slammed back out of the building again, angry as a wasp’s nest. “They’re gone,” he snarled, not having bothered to sheath his katana. 

@ @ @ 

Brad woke slowly, realizing he was no longer asleep, and no longer suffering from the aching pain. He moved cautiously and surprisingly, his head stayed attached to his neck. With a careful breath, he let his talent range ahead a few seconds, then a minute.   
The pain did not come charging back. He would live, he thought with some amusement. Quite frankly, he had not been joking earlier about wanting to just die.   
The room was dark, someone had pulled the drapes over the window. There was no sign of daylight around them. He looked at the clock glowing on the bedside. He’d slept that long? Unfortunately, he was still stuck in this nightmare bottle neck of the world.   
He rolled up into a sitting position, and felt for his glasses on the bedside table.   
The door opened, letting in a rectangle of light. Schuldig came in with a tray of food still steaming from a reheat in the microwave. “As long as you’ve been out, you need to eat,” he set the tray down on the bed and turned on the bedside lamp.   
Brad sighed. “I’m perfectly capable of getting myself out to the table.”   
Tiffany blue eyes swept over him in skepticism. “Only because I had to black you out, and don’t get me started on how mad at you I still am for making me go to that hell hole of a hospital without you.”  
“I had to concentrate,” Brad said levelly. “You would have shut me down sooner, and nothing would have gotten done,” he reached over and caught his lover’s wrist, gently pulling him closer, so that Schuldig had to put the tray down on the bed to embrace him. “I told you, I count on you to be strong, didn’t I?” Brad murmured, cheek against his stomach, hugging him, enjoying the stretch of his arm muscles around that firm body.   
Schuldig held him there, closing his eyes with relief. “Mein Mann, you scare the hell out of me sometimes,” he breathed.  
A muffled chuckle, and then warm brown eyes looked up at him. “Its only fair, considering how much grief you've given me.” He released Schuldig to pick up his glasses. He slid them on, and his eyes flashed gold, then brown again. “The others have gone to settle this.”   
“And I’ve fixed the woman. She’ll spill her guts to anyone who asks,” Schuldig stepped aside and picked up the tray, careful not to spill it. “Are you going to eat this or not?”   
Brad stood up, and found that his slacks had been undone along with his shirt front and cuffs, presumably to make him comfortable. Ruefully smiling, he started remedying this. “At the table, not like an invalid,” he said softly to lesson the complaint.   
“Which reminds me. You need to see these medical reports,” Schuldig carried the tray out. 

@ @ @ 

“Damn it.” Perhaps they should have waited for Brad to wake up after all, Yuuji thought.   
“Too bad we don’t have Farfarello with us,” Nagi sighed. “We could use a tracker.”  
“Where is the nearest time gate?” Yuuji demanded.   
Nagi closed his eyes to remember, then opened them. “That way,” he pointed. “About thirty feet, but you promised Schuldig…”  
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t look for evidence that they had gone through one,” Yuuji retorted. “Foot prints or something, like in the park.”   
“But we’re not going through,” Nagi said firmly. “We can’t take any more chances. Nothing about those things lines up. The Antikythera app is only for the anomaly, not the time gates.”   
“But it works in any year of the anomaly, you said so, kid, and I’m holding you to it,” Yuuji told him. “All we need is the date and time of when we are.” He held up the laminated instructions card in emphasis.  
Nagi scowled. “I promised, you promised; we stay in this time until Brad says otherwise,” his fists were clenched at his sides as he made his point. “Sarazawa, you’re thinking like Kudoh,” he snapped. “Fujimiya, did you disturb anything in there? Did they leave anything behind to come back to?” he turned to look at him.  
Aya had a hand on his katana, wary of the accusations flying between Naoe and Yuuji. “There was nothing. They cleared out.”   
Yuuji inhaled deeply, shoving his hair back behind his ears. “Normal. They’ve been compromised. Alright,” he relented. “We'll go back to the hotel.”  
“Nagi-kun,” Tot put a hand on his arm. “If they go back in time, can they warn the woman?” she asked in a worried, if high pitched, tone.  
“Shit!” Nagi and Yuuji said at the same time. 

@ @ @

Brad set the file down, thinking. This was stuff for Dr. Sarazawa, but it was worrisome. He looked at Schuldig, who sat across the table from him, toying with and sipping at a bottled water. “I’d rather he did examine Nagi before we leave. It might explain why his talent is immune to the anomaly’s influence, or why he has so great an amount of power.”   
“Yes,” Schuldig said.   
“But this is nothing you can find when you’re in someone’s head?” Brad tapped the file.  
“I can only find something wrong when the mind is aware of it.” The dark under his eyes only high lighting the blue in them. “Even on a subconscious level, I’ve found the mind will know certain things are going to need dealing with. It’s like “oh, I’m having a heart attack” just before some one croaks.” He frowned slightly and had another swallow of water. Stress was drying him out.   
“You said Frau Martz was pregnant, but you did not say how pregnant,” Brad remembered.   
“Yes, well, there’s your clue, I am not perfect,” Schuldig crushed the empty bottle in both hands and shifted his chair back to stand up. He tossed the bottle at a small blue trash basket near the kitchenette. “I only got a passing glance, and twins explains why the mind I heard was so strong.”  
Brad shook his head, then sighed and pulled his hands back over his head, his elbows resting on the table. He looked at the empty plates and then at the night sky outside the window. “This is—a waste of time, and a distraction I don’t need,” he shoved the files aside. “Save them for Dr. Sarazawa. Our goal is to get the hell out of here. If Nagi has time, I’ll send him. If not, well then, the good doctor will not answer my questions and I think that damned book on his desk has all the answers. I can either take a chance and steal the thing, or just let it go, and I’m thinking Shinjuku can sink the rest of the way to hell.” He got up and caught up the dirty dishes.   
The phone he had left on the coffee table began to ring. “Damn it, get that,” he told the red head who was nearer to it. He dumped the dishes in the little sink and caught the phone as Schuldig tossed it to him. “What now?” he asked.   
Yuuji’s voice came through. “Bad news. They bugged out and you know, there is just a crazy ass chance, they might go back in time and…”  
Brad looked over at her. She was still sitting on the floor, her back to the wall, legs drawn up, trying to ease the pressure of her arms being tied behind her back. “She’s still here. Maybe they can’t change time by warning her.”   
“Will you stop jumping my lines?” Yuuji said in irritation. “Just listen. We found the nearest time gate. There are signs at least three people went through very recent. Nagi’s threatening me, Aya’s going to kill him, and we need to find out if they can change time if they go back.”   
Brad closed his eyes and sighed deeply, trying to process this mess. “Give me a few minutes, I don’t want to trigger another migraine and there has got to be a way to…”  
“She is right there,” Schuldig pointed. “Just check her future.”  
Brad gave him the ‘smart ass’ look, then looked at the woman, focusing on her timeline.   
And got the strangest idea.   
“Grab her,” he hung up on Yuuji. “Let’s go.”   
Schuldig knew that tone of voice. Curious as hell, he knew he had to move right now rather than ask questions. 

@ @ @ 

The minute they were in the ER door, Schuldig commandeered a gurney and Brad heaved the still trussed up but struggling MOSSAD agent onto it, shoving her head down while Schuldig strapped her on with the belts attached to it. The orderly who had been pushing the empty gurney was momentarily bollixed into stupefaction by this bizarrely rude appropriation.   
“Mister Crawford,” Nurse said in tones that implied he was in really deep doo-doo this time. “Must you disrupt this hospital with your reprehensible antics?”  
“No time for territorial displays, I need Mephisto’s office now.” Brad stated. “I don’t care if he is in it or out, I need to get this woman there NOW.”   
Nurse motioned to one of her adjuncts and came out from behind the desk to grab the other end of the gurney and pull it toward the one elevator set off from the rest. She waved her bracelet over the sensor and the doors opened. They shoved the gurney in. “Honestly, you are pushing your luck,” she warned through clenched teeth as the doors closed and the elevator started up.   
“No, I’m not,” Brad retorted in a rather juvenile fit. “You want to save this pocket of insanity, you just hang on for the ride,” he snarled.  
She blinked at him.   
“I would be quiet now,” Schuldig advised her despite the creepy woogliness in his stomach from being this close to the creature. “He’s in one of those moods,” he said, more quietly himself.   
“Shut up, Schuldig,” Brad snapped, glaring at the floor level indicator. It did not go faster.   
Finally there was a little jump, and the doors opened across from the entrance to the over-opulent office of the head of the hospital. Nurse bracelet keyed the doors again, and guided the gurney in.   
Brad’s eyes scanned the room and found what he needed. “Cage,” he said, and shoved the gurney over that way.   
“What the fuck..?” Schuldig helped him push.   
Nurse went to the drawer and fished out a set of keys, finding one that fit the padlocked cage. She looked up at it in consternation. It was a good five feet off the floor.   
“Lower it,” Brad ordered, his hair half in his eyes again. “Schuldig, get the straps off her.”   
Nurse looked at the wall where the heavy chain was linked to an even heavier iron eyelet set in the wall. The whole thing must have weighed a ton. She frowned at Brad. “Close your eyes, Monkey,” she ordered in that nightmarish chorus voice, starting to waver around the edges.   
In a bit of a panic, both men turned and closed their eyes. Tzon was not so lucky.  
The cage hit the floor with a bit of a nasty crack.   
“Damn it, we’ll have to get new tiles,” Nurse said in a normal voice.   
Brad pulled the now dead weight limp Tzon off the gurney and half carried, half dragged her to the cage, practically throwing her in. He slammed the gate and held out his hand for the padlock, an old fashioned and slightly rusty chunk of iron.  
Nurse applied it to his palm as if it was a surgical tool. He put it on and latched it, then shoved his hair back out of his face. “Hang it up again,” he ordered.   
Nurse promised him a horrible death with her creepy silver-grey eyes and made the turn around motion with her hand.   
A moment later, the chain rattled, and then she said, “You can turn around now,” very sarcastically. “Now explain.”  
Brad looked. All was as it should be. The cage suspended, iron bars, iron chain. The only future he saw for the woman trapped inside was static. She would remain there until they took her out. “Cold iron,” he said, smoothing down his suit jacket and fixing his tie.   
“Isn’t that just a fairy tale?” Schuldig asked, then bit his lower lip as he realized Brad was going to kill him. And oooh, it was sexy, that glare of ‘death being imminent’, but once again, bad timing.   
There was a buzzing that the both of them had been ignoring through the sleigh ride from hell and Brad took his phone out of his pocket to answer it. “We’re safe, I’ve got her isolated from the anomaly.”  
Yuuji sighed and Brad heard him relay the info to Nagi. “Now the both of you, stand down,” his order came through the phone, presumably aimed at Fujimiya and Nagi. “We just nearly had another damned demon quake,” he informed Brad. “How the hell did you isolate her from Time?” he sounded very skeptical.  
“Explanations later. We’re at Mephisto Hospital,” Brad rubbed the skin under one eye, trying to stop the nerve twitching. “Put Nagi on.”   
“Well?” Nagi demanded.   
“The woman is isolated out of Shinjuku whack time by cold iron,” Brad told him. “Do you think you can go through the gate with out fucking up?”  
“If Farfarello can do it, I can,” Nagi stated. “Don’t you trust me?”  
Brad thought about this. “No. But if you fuck up, it’s your ass,” he said seriously.   
Nagi laughed harshly. “Okay, I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. We’ll find them.” He sounded calmer now, more confident.  
“Good boy,” Brad hung up on him before he could protest, and looked at Schuldig. “Two down, four to go. We’ll work it from our end.”  
“I’m undecided as to whether to have you wait here and explain this mess to the Doctor, or throw you both down the elevator shaft.” Nurse said.   
Brad laid his hand on the large, ornately tooled leather bound book on the doctor’s desk and smirked at her. “Let’s see which would be the correct answer, shall we?”   
Her face went blank. Her eyes went to where his fingers were just on the edge of the open side of the book, tensed to raise the cover. “That—is not for mortal eyes, Mr. Crawford.”  
“Oh, but my eyes are just a little bit different, aren’t they?” he taunted, curling his fingers ever so slightly more.   
She looked at said eyes. They were amber gold now, he was gambling on his own future. “If you look in that book, I can not guarantee you will ever ‘see’ anything else again. ‘Karma’ has a way of fixing things.” She warned him seriously.  
“Then you can explain to the doctor,” Brad took his hand off the book. “We have work to do.” He turned and grabbed Schuldig by the upper arm, pulling him stumbling until the red head caught his balance and turned to follow Brad out the doors.   
In the elevator, Schuldig inhaled, having been holding his breath. “Why the hell did you do that!” he exclaimed, reaching up to pull his bandana off and cover his mouth with it in case he screamed, he was that overloaded with fear adrenaline. He leaned on the hand rail, his knees weak. “I think I’m going to crap my pants,” he muffled through the yellow wad of fabric.   
“No, you’re not,” Brad said sternly, his nose crinkling. “Not while we’re in an elevator.”   
Schuldig inhaled deeply a few more times, like breathing into a paper bag, then took the cloth away from his mouth. “What were you thinking? I am too mad right now to even try to read your mind, because nothing you can think will answer that insane question, but I want an answer now. What. The. Fuck. Were you thinking?”  
“Have you ever heard of the Akashic Record?” Brad took him by the arm again and walked him out of the elevator, now that they had reached the ground floor.   
“Nine, vass ist?” Schuldig focused on him particularly, just to avoid the dirty looks all of Nurse’s avatars were giving them. He felt as if they were treading through a crocodile farm the morning after a staff holiday.   
“It’s a long standing belief in the older Asiatic civilizations; Hindu, Buddhist, what ever; that somewhere, everything that will happen to everything and anyone in all of reality is written down already, and nothing can change it,” Brad said somewhat grimly as they stepped out of the hospital’s doors. “That book is like a black hole in the timeline. It just—sits there, and everything—spins around it. When I was near it the other day, I felt it, pulling at my mind. Touching it just then, I think—I know now how you must feel when you touch me?” he looked at Schuldig, his face perturbed. “That nothing can be done, that everything has rested in place, that I could—let it all go and just accept things as they are. It wasn’t ‘Peace’ per se, but the certain knowledge that I was out of the game.”  
Schuldig blinked. “I don’t believe it. How could everything be written down? Everything? Like—everything?” he waved a hand in the night air to indicate the universe.   
“Maybe not written, but readable?” Brad mused. “Mephisto has that book, and even Nurse doesn’t like it. It must be incredibly powerful.”  
“But you change the timeline,” Schuldig countered. “So it can’t be…”  
“Oh, but it can,” Brad said, his tone and gaze somewhat distant. “I may be able to see and chose, but what I chose, that’s got to be in that book. The final choice.”   
Schuldig was looking around warily now. The street and building lights over the concrete apron before the entrance to the hospital made the unlit regions look black as ink. “We should get back to the hotel, or maybe just start randomly shooting. You know, just in case something is out here stalking us?” He took his gun out.  
“No time. We need to find Yuuji and the others,” Brad wished he’d put his trench coat on before leaving the hotel, but what the hell, he’d been manhandling a prisoner and it had been a matter of expedience. “Besides, nothing is going to attack us in the next ten minutes, so move it.”


	13. Chapter 13

  
Yuuji stood there eyeing the time gate. He was really beginning to hate the things. In the normal world, especially in an organization like Esset, you could easily track someone. Just hack into their routine and cross their path. In Weiss, the foot work had been done for them; they were simply the weapon. These damned time things added too many alternatives. You felt nothing when you stepped through them, but they could change your whole existence in too many bad ways. Bad enough he’d had two years stolen from him under what he realized now had been comparatively normal circumstances; but then he’d lost another five years of his life in the ‘real world’ in a single day in here. If things screwed up this time, how much would they lose?   
“This is getting too complicated,” Aya muttered beside him.   
“Screwed if we do, screwed if we don’t,” was Yuuji’s opinion.   
“We’d better do this,” Nagi sounded half reluctant. “I still have a good two decades before I retire, and I don’t want the world fucked up by another nuclear attack on my country.”   
“You’re planning on retiring at 31?” Yuuji wondered at the odds, rather than think any more about the worst case popping up in his head.   
“It’s been a rather insane life, I think I’m going to need to,” Nagi tipped his peaked cap back a little on his head, looking at the vortex. “Let’s get this over with,” He took Tot’s hand, returned her game grin, and lead her through. Yuuji and Aya followed him quickly.   
Yuuji looked around at the seemingly unchanged area, wary of anything that might be laying in wait for them. “I wonder how far we are behind them? Or did it spit us out at the same time it did them? Damn, this place drives me nuts.”  
It was still night time. They had gone through on the side with the most footprints in the dirt, so it was a good guess. Nagi took out a set of keys and turned on a little flashlight he kept on the ring, examining the ground. There were smudgy foot prints in the dirt covering the cracked concrete. He turned the light off and straitened up. “That way,” he pointed in the dusk. 

@     @     @

Brad slowed the SUV in front of the train station. Schuldig saw his eyes flash as he sought the correct way to go. Like his own talent, it was sort of just a thing; you got used to it. Now he tried to imagine how seeing the future would always be so boring. Yet here in this lunatic place, Brad could not always be sure of what he was seeing. “Are you alright?” he asked as Brad parked the vehicle and took the keys out of the ignition.   
“Fine,” Brad said distractedly. They got out of the car and Brad turned down the walk way that would lead them out of the station area on the other side, where a major region of the city had gone to ruin with the spread of nature. Broken walls, downed buildings, piles of dirt that had been heaved up in the catastrophic earthquake made a maze of what had been a major city center. A shattered water fountain had turned into a stream, digging a channel where the street had cracked. And the further away from the remaining working street lamps they were, the darker it became.   
“Um, dark out here,” Schuldig said, remembering the rumors of shadows that ate people.   
“Really, I hadn’t noticed. Just step carefully and keep your hand on my arm,” Brad advised, his tone making it clear his partner should have known better than to complain. “I don’t need you distracting me.”   
Schuldig rolled his eyes and remembered that being a smart ass was one of Brad’s many ‘endearing’ traits. You had to love a guy who could fucking duck bullets.   
Brad located the time gate and paused to think it over. Schuldig waited, his stomach flip-flopping. Then Brad pulled him through.   
And they nearly ran into the back of Fujimiya, who had just finished stepping through.   
“What the hell?” Yuuji turned, genuinely startled.   
Aya recovered from the jostle and slid his katana back where he had almost pulled it out, a glacial glare for Crawford his only response.   
Crawford gave Fujimiya a condescending smirk and shrugged at Yuuji. “I have no idea. If you went through well before us, why haven’t you moved along?”  
“We just got here—um…” Yuuji looked at Nagi.   
“Yeah, that was weird,” Nagi blinked. “Anyway, we think they went--.”  
“That way,” Brad pointed.   
Nagi sighed. “Then you lead.”   
“Thanks, I will,” Brad smiled at him, stepping past him.   
“Stick that tongue out at me one more time and I will hang you by it,” Nagi warned Schuldig.   
“Touchy-touchy,” the German said quietly.   
“Shut up, Schuldig,” Brad whispered harshly. /Do you possibly think you can start earning your pay by checking ahead of us to see if anyone is out there?/  
Schuldig declined to snark back at him and let go of Brad’s arm. He carefully opened his mental ears—and immediately found a very scary thought that ‘there were more of those little two legged morsels’ in something’s territory. He snatched at Brad’s arm again, more to hold him in place than to stop his own talent. “Something wants to eat us,” he hissed.   
“Oh lovely,” Yuuji said quietly, taking his gun out. “When doesn’t something want to eat us in here?”   
Aya turned to cover their rear, drawing out his katana.   
Nagi put up a light shield, one that could be strengthened at the merest touch on the outside, but not drain his stamina if he had to maintain it for long. Unfortunately, that meant when something did move against it, they were all pushed off the path along with the shield. Nagi focused on strengthening it just as something huge reared up to strike down at them.   
The thing hit an invisible steel wall. A fang shattered and slid down in a curve in the air.   
The giant snake hissed in anger, shaking its head and splattering blood, then whipped off through the trees like a freight train running late; crashing and crushing the undergrowth in its path.   
Nagi let out a woof of relief. “I hate this place,” he said soberly.   
“Too many damned things in here have human DNA!” Schuldig was irate. “How else could I have read that animal’s mind? What the hell!”  
“I don’t suppose it mentioned having eaten recently?” Brad inquired, tucking his gun away.   
Schuldig glared at him. (He should be used to reading a snake’s mind by now, jah?)  
Yuuji looked at Aya, who sheathed his sword again. “Why was it able to attack us this time, when last time…?”  
“If Naoe hadn’t put his shield up, I would have cut off its head,” Aya stated, irritated.   
“Just let it go,” Brad told Yuuji. “Schuldig,” he gave him a firm look.  
Schuldig sighed and took his hand back. He stood very still and listened very carefully, trying to think of all the little minds out there as just cartoon background or something. “Nothing,” he stated, catching Brad’s arm again to stabilize himself. “Could they have gone though another gateway?”  
“I’ve got a nasty feeling they did,” was Brad’s sour response. 

@ @ @

“What if we run into ourselves?” Jenkins asked as they frog hopped from building corner to low walls and trash bins in the night, making their way to where Brandower and Frankel were supposed to be waiting for them in a ‘safer’ part of the city.  
“How the hell should I know,” Alvarez was not happy with the chatter, but he’d found out it was better to just put up with it, rather than start an argument with Jenkins about his talking too much.   
They froze as something skittered in the cluster of trashcans ahead of them. They both took aim, small bodies of orange light showing up on their head gear’s heat read.   
A couple of large rats circled out from behind the cans and sat up, whiskers twitching, looking at them as if for all the world they were nosy neighbors.   
“Rats,” Jenkins stated in derision, lowering his gun. “You’d think this place would be clean of them, the way things mutate around here.”   
“Don’t be so quick to lower your weapon!” Alvarez shot at the rats as they suddenly snarled and leapt for the humans’ faces. Two quick bursts and the rats blew to pieces in mid air.   
Jenkins let out a cross between a huff and a whistle and shook his head. “Never seen a god damned rat jump that high!”   
“Maybe you should shut up and keep an eye out,” Alvarez warned.   
“No, man, I got an idea,” Jenkins said, taking a deep breath, prepared to expostulate.   
“Unh-unh,” Alvarez faced him angrily. “We get back to base, then you can tell Brandower. Until then, you shut up before you get us ambushed by more killer rats.”  
Jenkin’s dark face looked dangerously sullen, then he gave in. 

@ @ @

“This is the next closest time gate,” Nagi said as they arrived in front of yet another one of the odd, wavering, mirage-like disturbances in the air.   
“Concrete,” Yuuji stated dully, looking at the ground, which was indeed, neatly paved and wind swept clean with no way of finding tracks on it. “There has got to be a better way to do this than chasing all over the place,” he looked at Brad. “What was the point of getting that information from the witch?”   
Brad studied the time gate. “It was an attempt to make sense of how things in Shinjuku work. It answered my questions regarding how right or wrong my ability to see ahead was. And I think I know what my mistake has been in this all along,” he looked at Yuuji.   
“Getting involved in this shit in the first place?” Schuldig muttered sullenly.  
“That, too,” was the answer. “The problem I’m having is that there are not only the multiple temporal divergences I would normally see in the outside world, but layers as well. I was overloaded with too damned much information.”  
Yuuji sighed deeply. “For us normal morons,” he intoned dryly.   
Brad scowled. “It’s like a deck of cards. Outside Shinjuku, if you shuffle a deck and randomly pull out a card, I can tell you which card will be pulled before you do it; simply because the next choice of cards is the only one that will be made. In here, all the other cards images overlay the one you will chose, making it difficult to see through the possibilities until the card is pulled from the deck, but before it is turned over. My talent is either going to be stretched too thin with choices, or I have to accept being once again cut down to the last few seconds,” his expression darkened. “We need to set a trap.”

@ @ @

“We know the Nazis have been here in the city a few times,” Brandower said when all four of them were gathered in the abandoned conbini just off the railway station’s block.   
It was Shinjuku Year 9 and the place was stripped. There was a disturbing mess of shattered cooler glass, bent wire shelving and a lot of dried blood in one corner. It looked like someone had tried to hide from something in there, and it had gotten them anyway. Proof to the theory turned up when Jenkins had bent to look at a single tennis shoe, discarded half under a shelf. The bones were still in it.   
Someone had set up a fire pit, with a grid made from one of the cooler shelves. There was a fire burning in it now. Water was heating in someone’s camp kit pan.   
“Leverson was moved after we left him. And now they’ve got Tzon. It’s got to be the Nazis. If they’re on our trail, they must know something. We have to get out of here and complete the mission.”  
“Why can’t we just find Tzon before they catch her, and stop her from going into the Mayor’s office?” Jenkins asked, his impatience to put his idea forward worn thin.   
Brandower thought this over. “You know we’re in year 9, right?” he said seriously.   
Alvarez and Jenkins looked expectant. Frankel looked like he was thinking this was a good idea, too.  
“They got Tzon in Year 18,” Brandower pointed out. “Do you see her here now?”  
The other three looked at each other.   
“We lost Leverson in Year 12.” Brandower added, again looking at all three of them in turn. “Do you see him here with us now?”  
“This is weird, man,” Jenkins admitted. “Shouldn’t they be here?”   
“What ever this—bizarre set up with this temporal anomaly they’re calling it is, it’s made it impossible for anyone to be in two places at once,” Brandower looked up at the ceiling as if he could see the ‘dome’. “Physics still applies, though in a very warped way. Our primary goal is still to get out of here in the correct year, make sure the target does not become president, and stop the Nazis from taking the War on Terrorism out of Democratic hands.”  
“I don’t see how stopping that jerk from becoming president stops the Nazis,” Alvarez grumbled.   
“He gave up the whole West Coast and Pacific islands, didn’t he? By rights, that land should have gone to Mexico,” Frankel told him.   
“Hey, don’t patronize me just because I’m ‘Latino’,” Alvarez stated, aggravated. “For one thing, I’m Cuban-American, not Mexican; and for another, that was the asshat politicians’ financial problem with their bullshit fantasy plans….”  
Jenkins put a hand out to stay his fellow soldier before he got his ‘latin’ too far up and slugged the guy.   
“The fact still remains, we can’t let them win the war,” Frankel said darkly, then turned to dig in his back pack for something to eat. “It’s only a matter of logistics before they can go back in time through here and destroy all of history from the past, if they haven’t already planed it. The U.S. has to destroy the anomaly and this President won’t attack a Nazi backed Japan to do it.”  
Brandower just looked like he had a lot of things on his mind and said nothing.  
Alvarez and Jenkins glanced at each other. Neither one of them was about to say aloud what they were really thinking about the old feud between the Jews and the Nazis. 

@ @ @ 

Schuldig groaned and untied his bandana to pull it tighter, as if that would help his head. “I give up. Can’t we just go home and say we did?” he complained in a whiney growl. “This place will kill them anyway.”  
“No; it won’t,” Brad said ominously.   
"The woman?” Aya offered, purple eyes roving the surrounding bushes. “Use her as bait?”  
“Not so sure about that,” Yuuji countered. “They could have tried to stop us any time between the Mayor’s office and the hotel, and they didn’t.”  
“They’ve had to have been reading the papers, maybe been on line watching the news,” Brad mused thoughtfully. “They’d have to be, to keep track of what year they’re in.”   
“But what?” Schuldig was flummoxed, along with being leery of some noises he was hearing in the nearby bushes. The wind blew again and the noises were probably just branches, he was picking up no mind; man, plant or animal, but he was still very wary. “What would lure them out?”  
“You read the woman’s mind. What would?” Brad asked him simply.   
Schuldig looked stupid. The problem was that he did it so prettily, even in the moonlit dark. Brad’s expression fell even more. Schuldig got the message and racked his own aching brain for an answer. “The way out into the past?” he pointed up.   
“Why have I got a creepy bad feeling you guys just put a target on my back?” Nagi said sourly.   
“Excellent guess, Prodigy,” Brad smiled sardonically. “The good news is that it can all wait until morning.”  
“Which morning?” Yuuji complained. 


End file.
